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MrYenko posted:I’ve seen the opinion more than once that America’s greatest single development over the rest of the world was the early development of, and (mostly) free access to, credit. Credit is never free
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Jan 21, 2023 05:44
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I think "free" here means "anyone* can access it", not "it does not cost anything". * And yes, of course this is not literally anyone. Racism, sexism, and plain old risk aversion still play a hand.
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Jan 21, 2023 05:58
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:I think "free" here means "anyone* can access it", not "it does not cost anything".  /
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Jan 21, 2023 06:36
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Tomn posted:Question: When the news about the Portuguese finding a route to India started filtering out across Europe, how much of an impact did the altered trade flows have on the Ottomans? Did it affect their economy or tax income to any significant degree, or alter their strategic planning? Basically they let the Egyptians get their rear end kicked by the Portuguese then invade Egypt. Thus ending the Mamluk Empire. The Ottomans will spend the next two decades fighting the Portuguese with some success, but eventually losing. The only thing I remember in any depth is that one of the outgrowths of this is the Ethiopian–Adal War. The Portuguese end up assisting Ethiopia against the Adal Sultanate.
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Jan 21, 2023 06:52
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Tomn posted:Question: When the news about the Portuguese finding a route to India started filtering out across Europe, how much of an impact did the altered trade flows have on the Ottomans? Did it affect their economy or tax income to any significant degree, or alter their strategic planning? This is literally the subject of literature, but a tl;dr is that the growth of trade to the far east was just that - growth, and not really zero sum in that it cost the Ottomans in that immediate regard. They did devote significant resources to defeating the Portuguese nonetheless, to mixed success.
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Jan 21, 2023 07:05
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madeintaipei posted:Point being, there wasn't much of a reason to mechanize society with so little opportunities for it to make a difference. From context, I think the town I'm asking about is in Minnesota. It definitely appears to be in the U.S., at least, given the 213 cars (per thousand people) figure. We've had multiple discussions in this thread about relative levels of agricultural mechanization in major economies at the time of WWII and how badly Germany compares, I think usually sourced from Wages of Destruction. What I'm wondering at here is whether American agricultural mechanization put vehicles in Tulip's grandparent's town area despite the low local distribution of car ownership.
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Jan 21, 2023 07:36
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Lady Radia posted:This is literally the subject of literature, but a tl;dr is that the growth of trade to the far east was just that - growth, and not really zero sum in that it cost the Ottomans in that immediate regard. They did devote significant resources to defeating the Portuguese nonetheless, to mixed success. Yeah the Venetian Levant trade remained a very big deal for at least 50 years, I'm not actually sure when it even starts to die down
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Jan 21, 2023 08:22
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Cessna posted:The Red Army underwent a substantial motorization program starting in 1938, but a lot of that vehicle transport was lost in the initial Barbarossa attack That was pretty much what I was saying I think, yes. Also, and again, and some more, civilian car ownership does not map on to how motorised the military is, in much the same way that nobody in the USSR in the 50s had a colour TV or a fridge but the first satellite into space is called 'Sputnik' not 'Explorer' and the first man in space is called 'Yuri Gagarin' not 'Alan Shepard'. Different societies allocate their national production differently.
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Jan 21, 2023 11:54
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MrYenko posted:I’ve seen the opinion more than once that America’s greatest single development over the rest of the world was the early development of, and (mostly) free access to, credit. As for this one - check out the Napoleonic Wars and Britain's invention of the idea of 'national debt'. Something something 'Britain will fight to the body of the last Pomeranian' (financed by Britain) or something along those lines. feedmegin fucked around with this message at 12:12 on Jan 21, 2023 |
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Jan 21, 2023 11:55
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If people want more of an idea about what was going on in interwar Germany with regards to mechanisation and agriculture thread fave Adam Tooze did a lecture on it: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...DJxDK-zT5cJS2Tg
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Jan 21, 2023 13:14
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MrYenko posted:I’ve seen the opinion more than once that America’s greatest single development over the rest of the world was the early development of, and (mostly) free access to, credit. I wasn't aware that any of the civilizations from the Americas managed to pre-date the invention of free credit in Mesopotamia*, about 5000 years ago. Do you have any sources? *Around ca. 3000 BC the Mesopotamians already used a robust credit system where farmers could "loan" grain seed, which they then had to pay back with interest after the harvest. German Wikipedia has for some reason a big block of credit history, and a lot of historical sources at the bottom. Looks like someone had a lot of time to burn, ha ha. 
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Jan 21, 2023 17:57
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feedmegin posted:That was pretty much what I was saying I think, yes. Also, and again, and some more, civilian car ownership does not map on to how motorised the military is, in much the same way that nobody in the USSR in the 50s had a colour TV or a fridge but the first satellite into space is called 'Sputnik' not 'Explorer' and the first man in space is called 'Yuri Gagarin' not 'Alan Shepard'. Different societies allocate their national production differently. I remember Shattered Sword mentioning the fact that Japanese mechanics were hard to come by due to the low numbers of civilian motorized vehicles in service compared to the United States.
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Jan 21, 2023 18:33
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Libluini posted:I wasn't aware that any of the civilizations from the Americas managed to pre-date the invention of free credit in Mesopotamia*, about 5000 years ago. Do you have any sources? Also fairly regular debt forgiveness cycles
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Jan 21, 2023 19:10
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PittTheElder posted:Also fairly regular debt forgiveness cycles quote:117. If any one fail to meet a claim for debt, and sell himself, his wife, his son, and daughter for money or give them away to forced labor: they shall work for three years in the house of the man who bought them, or the proprietor, and in the fourth year they shall be set free.
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Jan 21, 2023 19:14
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OpenlyEvilJello posted:From context, I think the town I'm asking about is in Minnesota. It definitely appears to be in the U.S., at least, given the 213 cars (per thousand people) figure. We've had multiple discussions in this thread about relative levels of agricultural mechanization in major economies at the time of WWII and how badly Germany compares, I think usually sourced from Wages of Destruction. What I'm wondering at here is whether American agricultural mechanization put vehicles in Tulip's grandparent's town area despite the low local distribution of car ownership. The minnesota guy was different, his family was ranching not farming so never even asked him about tractors. My grandfather was from western South Dakota. They were not involved in farming, so no idea if they were using livestock or just all-hand. My mother was involved in farming in the 50s and 60s in Wisconsin, they only got a tractor in the 60s, before then they used cows, though she did grow up with a car (the cows were overall a lot more valuable than the crops; properly it would be said this was a dairy rather than a farm, but they did grow some crops for home use while the milk and older cows were sold off as the actual revenue stream).
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Jan 21, 2023 19:28
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SerthVarnee posted:I remember Shattered Sword mentioning the fact that Japanese mechanics were hard to come by due to the low numbers of civilian motorized vehicles in service compared to the United States. Wasn't this more of a "just-so" sort of story because wouldn't you be training people anyways? I can see it being more of an issue with the army because there should be a lot more vehicles and you can't train *everyone*, but for the IJN if you're going to have a special elite damage control team on your boat shouldn't there be a pipeline for them anyways?
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Jan 21, 2023 20:44
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Raenir Salazar posted:Wasn't this more of a "just-so" sort of story because wouldn't you be training people anyways? I can see it being more of an issue with the army because there should be a lot more vehicles and you can't train *everyone*, but for the IJN if you're going to have a special elite damage control team on your boat shouldn't there be a pipeline for them anyways? That's for the ground forces anyway. IJN I don't know how they did it, but it also sounds like it would be a smaller team.
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Jan 21, 2023 21:19
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Tulip posted:The minnesota guy was different, his family was ranching not farming so never even asked him about tractors. Cool, thanks. I always tend to view my family experience as reasonably typical for the Plains, but I don't have the knowledge base to declare it to be true. They're also further south, deep in the Dust Bowl zone, and that may well make a huge difference.
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Jan 21, 2023 21:41
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My takeaway from Shattered Sword was that the IJN put all of its extremely well trained eggs in one basket and then lost that basket after making a series of extremely bad decisions that they felt they had to do for a variety of reasons. Lack of car mechanics or not, reconstituting an entire naval aviation program from scratch in less than a year while at war was a pretty tall order. Probably even harder than the USN's problem of finding and training enough people to staff 140 new aircraft carriers.
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Jan 21, 2023 23:31
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Raenir Salazar posted:Wasn't this more of a "just-so" sort of story because wouldn't you be training people anyways? I can see it being more of an issue with the army because there should be a lot more vehicles and you can't train *everyone*, but for the IJN if you're going to have a special elite damage control team on your boat shouldn't there be a pipeline for them anyways? The relevancy came from the hassle of training up new aviation mechanics to replace those lost at Midway. Having to teach a batch of recruits from scratch versus the Americans having all sorts of tinkering experiences that can be abstracted into working with a different type of engine meant a lot when it came to finding people who had the aptitude for rapid learning and the physical skills to do precise mechanic work well. With enough time, effort and investment, everyone can become a mechanic if the need is great enough for them. But Time and resource investment very not exactly things that Japan had in abundance considering the war they threw themselves into. Effort and dedication to the task was certainly there, but that just isn't enough on its own.
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Jan 22, 2023 00:01
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Also, one of the big things about the IJN versus the USN is that the IJN for most of the war treated damage control and maintenance as a thing for specialists. The USN expected and demanded every sailor to assist in damage control as necessary, and that's the kind of thing where having a lot of random people who know a bit about engines and electricity can be pretty handy. They might not know how to fix anything in particular, but they're very likely to at least know some basic rules of safety and what to not do.
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Jan 22, 2023 03:23
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Raenir Salazar posted:Wasn't this more of a "just-so" sort of story because wouldn't you be training people anyways? I can see it being more of an issue with the army because there should be a lot more vehicles and you can't train *everyone*, but for the IJN if you're going to have a special elite damage control team on your boat shouldn't there be a pipeline for them anyways? It is more about training time. If someone already has a few years experience with maintaining some kind of motorized vehicle you can retrain him for the military vehicles in a few weeks. If he has never seen a motor before that might take years.
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Jan 22, 2023 12:22
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I think focusing on this car ownership stat is just too "neat". Owning a car does not imply you know how to maintain a car, it doesn't somehow shortcut the equivalent of years of training. I can maybe take a tyre off but that's going to help me precisely zero on operating a battleship. Frankly my "years of experience" operating a car hasn't taught me anything you couldn't put on a 2 page leaflet. Depending on the application, also, the numbers are pretty small so I think an actual problem of "not enough general purpose technical people to crew your ships" is not likely to be a real bottleneck. (Also for instance, the Soviets never seemed to have much trouble training up tank mechanics in a hurry) The bottleneck seems to be more a matter of how training is designed, the resources to make it happen, and the way institutional knowledge is built up. I'm part way through Neptune's Inferno and there's a clear difference in how the USN sought to learn lessons from each battle, and on the IJN side, officers having to beg the captain of lost ships to not kill themselves so they can actually report on what went wrong. Fangz fucked around with this message at 13:44 on Jan 22, 2023 |
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Jan 22, 2023 13:37
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Don’t extrapolate the car ownership experience now and think that’s how it was before WWII. Owning a car at the time necessitated a lot more practical knowledge or a hell of a lot more money. High prevalence of mechanization in a society in general also means there are more people employed in maintaining and repairing those various machines, which is a useful skilled labor pool.
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Jan 22, 2023 13:47
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Don’t extrapolate the car ownership experience now and think that’s how it was before WWII. Owning a car at the time necessitated a lot more practical knowledge I think you might need to provide some sort of evidence that every car owner in the 1930s was their own mechanic, and that this translated into useful knowledge in the context of for example a tank (that couldn't be taught in the space of about a week).
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Jan 22, 2023 15:36
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The stats don't suggest that everyone knew mechanic stuff, only that there was a much larger pool of people with basic mechanical literacy.
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Jan 22, 2023 15:49
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With old cars it was also possible to do repairs on the road with some basic equipment or at the very least you could locate the problem without having a doctorate in engine diagnostics. Source: My Summer Car
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Jan 22, 2023 16:29
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feedmegin posted:I think you might need to provide some sort of evidence that every car owner in the 1930s was their own mechanic, and that this translated into useful knowledge in the context of for example a tank (that couldn't be taught in the space of about a week). I don't need to do that at all because I am not saying that every car owner in the 1930s was their own mechanic. I am saying 1) that more cars, trucks, and tractors means more mechanics in the labor force and more people with mechanical training and aptitude in the labor force and 2) that the average car owner in the 1930s possessed more working knowledge of how their car operated than the average indoor kid goon in 2020. Neither of those things is remotely controversial except to you, evidently. Also, it takes a long time to become a good mechanic. The military works a bit differently in terms of structure and requirement, but for a single brand automotive role in the US it takes at least a year of technical school and then three years of practical experience to be truly useful. In World War II things were more mechanically simple (but also way less reliable), but fixing complex machinery is non-trivial. The idea that oh you can just take a dude off the street and train em up bing bong so simple is really dumb. You CAN train a dude but when you're teaching a dude what a carburetor is and why its function is important you're starting from a way lower base.
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Jan 22, 2023 16:57
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If a lot of people own cars, that also means your country is making a lot of cars, which means they can pretty easily convert their lines to make army vehicles.
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Jan 22, 2023 17:33
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KYOON GRIFFEY JR posted:Don’t extrapolate the car ownership experience now and think that’s how it was before WWII. Owning a car at the time necessitated a lot more practical knowledge or a hell of a lot more money. feedmegin posted:I think you might need to provide some sort of evidence that every car owner in the 1930s was their own mechanic, and that this translated into useful knowledge in the context of for example a tank (that couldn't be taught in the space of about a week). It is, for some reason, difficult to source maintenance manuals for 1930s vehicles for free, but a Ford Model A (1927-1931) is supposed to get an oil change every 500 miles and get a bunch of stuff greased (doesn't say if that's the original recommendation, modelagarage.com) Average weekly wage for a highly skilled mechanic was about $50 in 1932, and they worked 45-50 hours/week. https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title...?start_page=150 So, let's say that a regular maintenance took the equivalent of 3 highly skilled person-hours, and the markup was 100% ($6). Fuel cost $0.20/gallon, and materials for a full oil change cost about 10x a gallon of gas today, so maintenance costs were something like $8/500 miles (probably a bit less, but I'll use $8 for now) For comparison, a 1932 Chevy Confederate cost $635 per: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015002064452&view=1up&seq=12. Dealer maintenance on a $25k car is, on average, about $300 every 5000 miles (ish), so while service costs as a % of purchase price are roughly the same, maintenance costs per mile are at least 2-3x what they are today, so there was a financial incentive to e.g. change your own oil and do your own routine maintenance. On the other hand, per: https://americanhistory.si.edu/america-on-the-move/building-fixing-cars (warning:tertiary at best), there were more than 60k garages in the USA in the 20s, and per https://pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu/evolution-of-local-dealerships/chapter/chapter-one-early-years-of-the-u-s-automobile-industry-1896-1939/ during the Great Depression most dealerships were kept afloat by used car sales and maintenance. Total US population in 1932 was about 124 million, and the auto industry was in a slump so they only sold 1 million new cars that year, so at 200 cars/1k pop there were at least 20 million used cars out there at the time. Per https://www.forbes.com/sites/jimgorzelany/2013/03/14/cars-that-can-last-for-250000-miles/?sh=31c4c5ab323e the 1930s car lifetime was about 7 years. However, I didn't need to look any of that poo poo up, because I found stats for total vehicle-miles travelled, which lets me estimate how many mechanics there are directly: https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/summary95/vm201a.pdf 1936: A. Total Travel Million Vehicle-Miles 252,128 B. Number of Registered Vehicles Number of Vehicles 28,506,891 C. Average travel per Vehicle Miles 8,844 D. Total Fuel Consumption Million Gallons 18,099 E. Average Fuel Consumed per Vehicle Gallons 635 F. Average per Gallon Consumed Miles 13.9 So, If the average vehicle needs service every 500 miles, and that service takes 1 hour on average, and mechanics work 50 hours/week and work 50 weeks a year, there need to be 200k full-time mechanics in the USA in 1936 just to keep up with regular maintenance, never mind anything else. Did some people do their own maintenance? Anecdotally, yes, given the number of tips about disposing of used motor oil in your backyard. Per https://www.nissan-global.com/EN/HERITAGE/short_story/en_p09-02.html we can say that Japan had the same-ish car composition that the US did, seeing as they were mostly Ford/US imports, but if you look at car production for 1932 compared to the USA, they were well ramping up, they made almost 25 thousand cars, compared to the USA, who were having a really bad year and only made 40x as many new cars as Japan did, so the pool of mechanics in absolute terms was a lot larger in the USA at that point. [Note: All this is Malcom Gladwell-level research, don't cite it] Other interesting, and potientally actually thread-relevant, content: https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/automobile-rationing-world-war-ii
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Jan 22, 2023 18:54
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My objection is that you've confusing what is largely an effect of an increasingly literate and educated populace with it being a cause.
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Jan 22, 2023 18:57
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thepopmonster posted:It is, for some reason, difficult to source maintenance manuals for 1930s vehicles for free, but a Ford Model A (1927-1931) is supposed to get an oil change every 500 miles and get a bunch of stuff greased (doesn't say if that's the original recommendation, modelagarage.com) This is from the "Pitman's Motorists' Book of the Austin Seven" - 1937 Edition. ["Daily Attentions" are just the radiator water, engine oil and petrol levels] Every Week - With a grease gun charge the four front spring shackle pins, the two rear spring pins, the two front axle swivel pins, each end of the steering cross tube and the front end of the torque tube. Oil both steering side-tube joints. Examine the brakes and adjust if necessary. Test and check the tyres. Every Month/2000 miles - Examine the gearbox oil level. Examine the back axle oil level. Add fresh oil if necessary. Grease all wheel hubs. Oil clutch release ring. Inject oil into the steering gear box. Oil the braking system and all control joints. Examine the battery, top-up with distilled water if necessary. Give ignition distributor oiler a few drops of light oil. Grease the fan spindle. Every Two Months/3000 miles - Change engine oil. Clean sparking plugs and set gap. Every Four Months/5000 miles - Remove engine sump, clean gauze strainer and interior of engine. Change gearbox oil. Change back axle oil. Clean carburettor air cleaner. Attend to oiling of the cleaner element depending on dust/dirt conditions. Annually/15,000 miles - Examine all nuts and bolts (e.g. road spring clips, cylinder heat nuts, wheel nuts). Examine steering links, radius rod anchorage and torque tube socket. Clean float chamber strainers and petrol filter and ensure oil jets in the crankcase are clean. Flush radiator through. Clean ignition distributor and coil and clean and adjust HT contact breaker points and dynamo and starter commutators. Adjust valve tappets and fan belt, decarbonize the engine and lap in the valves. As I alluded to in my earlier post, the Seven was a relatively crude and old-fashioned machine (especially by 1930s standards - it was actually replaced by an all-new model right on the brink of WW2). It achieved its low sale price through simplistic and simple engineering, keeping the cost of manufacture and purchase down but committing the owner to a lot of upkeep on lubricating and checking various parts on a regular basis. But this was the sort of car in reach of the average British person in the 1930s, and there was a strong trend towards people being DIY mechanics because they could afford a second-hand 'Baby Austin' (or similar small, cheap car) secondhand but could not afford to have a garage do all the upkeep. Hence the market for books like the Pitman series. And it lays out that - going by the schedule - owners would not only be greasing, oiling and adjusting various bearings, shafts, cables and pivots on a weekly basis but setting aside a weekend a year (at least) to dismantle their car's engine to decoke it and grind in the valves. I'm positive that then, as now, plenty of drivers didn't religiously attend to the official schedule and only attended to things as specific problems arose, but I know from experience that if you don't at least oil and adjust an Austin Seven's brakes on a fairly regular basis, you'll soon end up with no brakes at all, and without decoking at some point the 11bhp that your car is supposed to have will quickly wither and you won't be going anywhere. And that's without getting into things like draining the water and oil each night in winter to stop it freezing/congealing, learning all the tricks to coax an engine into life on a cold morning, how to set the ignition timing and mixture levers, the knack of double-clutching into gear and so on. These things can all be learned by rote, of course, (my sister had an old Mini as her first car, with a manual choke. She never had the slightest idea what it actually did but she knew perfectly what position to set it in for any given temperature and how long the engine needed to run before it could be opened) but many owners would have picked up the essential principles of how internal combustion machinery worked , how it is operated and how to maintain it. Of course Fangz is right that there is a correlation/causation to determine here. The fact that the Pitman guides exist, printed in bulk at 5 shillings a pop, to inform anyone exactly how to maintain their car, point to a population with the literacy, education, means and ability to make use of them (and the dozens of other do-it-yourself guides that existed for all sorts of things). But they also illustrate how relatively 'hands on' car owners had to be in that era (especially when in the cheaper end of the market), and that would surely give a useful 'friction reduction' in educating thousands of tank mechanics, motor launch engineers or aero-engine fitters.
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Jan 22, 2023 19:39
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Fangz posted:My objection is that you've confusing what is largely an effect of an increasingly literate and educated populace with it being a cause. That doesn't really explain the US vs. Japan, though, as far as mechanization and availability of trained mechanics goes. I don't have numbers at my fingertips for Japan pre-war, but the US did a survey in iirc 1947 when they were gearing up to reform the Japanese school system post-war and found that 97% of the population was literate. For comparison: In 1902 Prussia had an illiteracy rate of .02%. Posen, which was one of the more educationally blighted areas in the 19th century (15.59% illiteracy rate on the eve of unification), had an illiteracy rate of .06%. The German average was 99.97% literate. Literacy in the US really explodes in the decades on either side of the Civil War, with the general trend being that the North East has the highest rates of literacy and the south and the frontier have the lowest, something which can really be laid at the foot of the Common School Movement coming out of Massachusetts, and the improvements tend to radiate out from there. In 1910, for example, about 81% of children nation-wide are in some form of regular schooling, but it was down around 70% in the South and 90% in New England. The net result is that right before WW1 the literacy rate in the US is 93.3%. Meanwhile Imperial Russia is just a complete loving poo poo show with a stark urban/rual divide that actually manages to make some of the hosed up poo poo you see in black vs. white education in the US look good by comparison. In 1897 the census shows 13% living in urban centers. Of the 13% of urbanites, 45% were literate. Literacy rates in rural areas were averaging about 17%, with the asian territories ranging form 1.6% on the high end to 0.6% on the low end. Basically, the literacy rate of the worst areas of Russia matched the illiteracy rate of the worst areas of Germany right before WW1. Now, the Soviets made un-loving education a massive priority (and, as an aside, Lenin did a lot better with this than Stalin, who rolled back a lot of reforms). The improvements are dramatic, with the percentage of children enrolled in some kind of education going from 51 to 97% in the first five-year plan alone. Now, there is a lot of room to pick at some of these statistics since reporting in the early USSR could be wonky and politically motivated, but the results were pretty apparent. There's a clear anecdotal explosion in literacy, and the internally reported figures show some strong improvement while still recognizing areas that needed fixing. In the 1939 census they recorded a general literacy rate of 81.2%, with people between 9 and 49 years old having a literacy rate of 89.1%. Again, this might be due to charitable definitions of literacy and what degree of mastery constitutes it, but at the very least you're talking about tens of millions of people gaining at least rudimentary abilities to engage with printed instructions and culture.
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Jan 22, 2023 19:50
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Cyrano4747 posted:literacy Ok, with that background out of the way, when it comes to this: Fangz posted:My objection is that you've confusing what is largely an effect of an increasingly literate and educated populace with it being a cause. It's both correct and incorrect. As I mentioned above, it doesn't explain the disparity in either mechanization or available skilled mechanical labor between the US and Japan, and if anything going by pure educational/literacy accomplishments Germany should have had a lead on even the US. That said, there is a correlation insofar as literate people are easier to train. This was something the Soviets wrestled with quite a bit, because they had the industrialization and mechanization of their economy and society as a matter of national policy. Put simply, it's a loving lot easier to turn peasants into factory workers if they have the ability to read manuals and textbooks. When it comes to training engineers and supervisors some degree of literacy is flat out necessary. The US and Germany were fortunate enough to have had their educational revolutions and the birth of what we can recognize today as the antecedents to their state educational systems in the early- mid 19th century, before industrialization was really in full swing. By the time you get to the late 19th century you're at a starting place where industrialists in those countries can flat out expect that their workers will be able to understand basic written instruction. Indeed, in the US in particular educational reform in the early 20th century and the final push to compulsory, government-supplied primary education was in no small part driven by people who wanted a better educated work force. It's impossible to fully describe just how hosed up Russia was in 1920, and just how much work the new government had on its hands in their drive to industrialize and modernize. So the literacy/educational thing is one of those areas where it's clearly important and has some influence, but it's no where near enough to explain the prevalence of either professional mechanics or the ability and willingness of an educated population to tinker and change oil in their garage. The examples of both Japan and rural Germany pre-WW2 point to a lot of other factors as well. I suspect that looking at the average size of family farms would also yield some interesting insight here.
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Jan 22, 2023 20:00
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Ok, so I got intrigued enough by the farm size thing to do some light looking around. I found an article on historical farms sizes in the US. Apparently the US in particular has good info on this due to how property ownership was recorded in the census I guess? Either way, here are the two major bullet points:  Average farm size is ~150-200 acres in century spanning the Civil War and WW2. Now, that's an average, so a handful of mega farms could be skewing it. In particular I'm wondering if the drop in the average post-civil war might represent some of the bigger plantations getting broken up. Still, an average of ~175 acres in 1940 is telling. Even if we assume the true mean is half of that, 80+ acres is way too much to farm by hand. That's at the size where you could probably swing it with draft animals and enough farm hands, but mechanization is going to be really, REALLY attractive. You're also probably earning enough at that scale that you can afford to buy or rent a tractor. Also interesting is the relative rarity of extremely small (<3 acres) farms:  Sub-1%. So we can equally assume that there's not a heaving mass of extremely small landholders who don't need mechanization at all. I can't find hard numbers on the historic size of farms in Germany, but we've got plenty of anecdotal evidence in this thread of people's Omas and Opas being on some small as gently caress farms. What I did find was an article about industrialization in Baden-Wurttemburg that specifically calls out how in the 1860s a huge chunk of the farmers were on small enough holdings that they needed to do laborer work in towns to make ends meet. I also found a report from Nordrhein-Westfallen that says that in 2007 the average farm size was 80 hectares (1 hectare ~2.5 acres). Then there is also this interesting tidbit about the distribution:  tl;dr, the typical farm is small with a few big ones skewing things, but the big ones are the most productive ones. So even in 2007, after two massive waves of consolidation in the 1880s and post-ww2, the average German farm is only about the size of the average farm in the US in 1940, and there are a few scholars who presumably have access to the kinds of data I can't find with lazy googling writing about how yeah, the average farm in the late 19th century was small as gently caress. I don't think it's too much to extrapolate out that you're just going to have way, WAY fewer people who owning a tractor either makes sense for (small farm, can till it by hand if necessary) or is financially viable for (have to work as a laborer to make ends meet, not going to buy heavy machinery.) No interesting graphs for this ,but it's also worth noting that a consolidation of farms was a major emphasis in Soviet agriculture in the 20s-30s as well. There's a lot to be said about the problems surrounding communal farming, but at the very least it increases the size of the productive lots to the point where a tractor makes sense, and it provides a situation where the farm has the resources to get one.
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Jan 22, 2023 20:24
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Was curious how the Homestead Acts aligned with that average US farm size:1841 Preemption Act posted:The Preemption Act of 1841 allowed settlers to claim up to 160 acres of federal land for themselves, and prevent its sale to others including large landowners or corporations; they paid only a low fixed price of $1.25 per acre ($3.09 per hectare). 1850 Oregon Donation Land Claim Act posted:The Oregon Donation Land Claim Act was passed in 1850 and allowed white settlers to claim 320 acres or 640 to married couples between 1850 and 1855 when the act was repealed. 1862 Homestead Act posted:The Homestead act expanded, rather than changed, the 1841 Preemption Act. The claimed homestead could include the same land which they had previously filed a preemption claim (on up to 160 acres at $1.25 per acre, or up to 80 acres of subdivided and surveyed land at $2.50 per acre), and they could expand their current ownership to contiguous adjacent land up to 160 acres total. 1873 Timber Culture Act posted:The Timber Culture Act granted up to 160 acres of land to a homesteader who would plant at least 40 acres (revised to 10) of trees over a period of several years. This quarter-section could be added to an existing homestead claim, offering a total of 320 acres to a settler. 1904 Kinkaid Act posted:Recognizing that the Sandhills of north-central Nebraska required more than 160 acres for a claimant to support a family, Congress passed the Kinkaid Act, which granted larger homestead tracts, up to 640 acres, to homesteaders in Nebraska. 1909 Enlarged Homestead Act posted:Because by the early 1900s much of the prime low-lying alluvial land along rivers had been homesteaded, the Enlarged Homestead Act was passed in 1909. To enable dryland farming, it increased the number of acres for a homestead to 320 acres (130 ha) given to farmers who accepted more marginal lands (especially in the Great Plains), which could not be easily irrigated. So pretty much 160 acres was the floor for what you could homestead in the west, and from my understanding you only had to 'improve' the land over time versus actually cultivate the entire claim.
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Jan 22, 2023 21:51
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Cyrano4747 posted:I can't find hard numbers on the historic size of farms in Germany, but we've got plenty of anecdotal evidence in this thread of people's Omas and Opas being on some small as gently caress farms. What I did find was an article about industrialization in Baden-Wurttemburg that specifically calls out how in the 1860s a huge chunk of the farmers were on small enough holdings that they needed to do laborer work in towns to make ends meet. I also found a report from Nordrhein-Westfallen that says that in 2007 the average farm size was 80 hectares (1 hectare ~2.5 acres). Wages of Destruction specifically calls out that one of the driving Nazi goals was to get more farmers on "sustainable" farm sizes of at least 20ha (~50 acres). That was considered to be a size sufficient to sustain a family, without being so large that they would have to pull in a lot of outside labor. One of the things they tried doing was creating what amounts to an heritage listing for farms, where the farm would be exempt from some things (property taxes, IIRC), but could no longer be partibly inherited, or used as collateral for loans. I don't think it goes into the specifics on the inheritance issue, but it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of German farms kept getting subdivided so that multiple children would have pots to work, past the point where those plots could sustain those children, let alone where they could be farmed efficiently using modern equipment. tl;dr there were a lot of tiny farms in Germany.
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Jan 22, 2023 23:16
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Cyrano4747 posted:Average farm size is ~150-200 acres in century spanning the Civil War and WW2. Now, that's an average, so a handful of mega farms could be skewing it. In particular I'm wondering if the drop in the average post-civil war might represent some of the bigger plantations getting broken up. more likely that it is a sharp increase in the number of settler farmers who are willing to work smaller farms as the railroads move west and stolen land is handed out and sold off on the cheap
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Jan 23, 2023 01:55
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Mr. Fall Down Terror posted:more likely that it is a sharp increase in the number of settler farmers who are willing to work smaller farms as the railroads move west and stolen land is handed out and sold off on the cheap You know, that's actually an interesting question - who actually WERE the settlers of the American West? Where did they come from, and what kind of backgrounds did they have? Dispossessed third and fourth children of overcrowded farmer families in the East? City-dwellers hoping to find fresh opportunity? Did they tend to be very poor and hoping to improve their lot, or did the costs of buying even cheap land and moving raise the bar - and if so, how high was the bar raised? Were homesteads handed out to lone families only, or were there ever commune-type setups where people who couldn't individually afford to buy the land and make the trip got together to be able to communally do so? Did they tend to come from the North or the South, inland or coastal regions? In short, were there any particular notable demographic patterns to who ended up settling the West?
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Jan 23, 2023 02:15
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I can't imagine a very poor person making it out west. Moving is pretty capital-intensive even today, let alone 200+ years ago. Let alone when you need to clear land and build your house when you arrive. Beyond that, I have no idea.
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Jan 23, 2023 02:46
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