Growth or Stability

Peasants in medieval England participated in a common-field farming approach that consisted of three great fields. In any given year, the great fields would be designated for wheat, barley, or left fallow in a rotation understood to maintain optimal soil conditions. By foregoing immediate production and giving a field time to recover, overall yields would be more stable and secure. It was a tradeoff between short-term production capacity and long-term stability, with the peasants opting for stability.

What is more interesting is how these great fields were subdivided among the peasants. Instead of each having their own contiguous section, each peasant would have up to a dozen scattered plots throughout. They would tend to each of these, shunning a consolidation of holdings for an approach that involved burning precious calories walking between plots.

A similar approach has been witnessed in modern times in the Andean mountains of Peru. There the subsistence farmers would likewise scatter their plots over a large area, walking long distances in between to tend to each one. Development experts studying this situation concluded that the Peruvians were paying “intolerably high” costs for all this inefficiency, something more advanced people would not do.

The peasant’s cumulative agricultural efficiency is so appalling . . . that our amazement is how these people even survive at all.

The expert recommendation was to create a land swapping program so these seemingly uneducated, backward peasants could consolidate their holdings and, through improved efficiencies, realize more of the fruits of their own labor.

This was reported in a journal article by researcher Carol Goland, who, with a level of humility not seen in the development experts, sought to understand why peasants would scatter their plots in this way. What she discovered by asking – and then confirmed through measurement and calculation – was that spreading plots is a risk management strategy. In any given year, one plot may be randomly wiped out. Having enough plots, and having them spread out, ensured the peasant family wouldn’t starve.

Geographer and historian Jared Diamond examined Goland’s research in his book The World Until Yesterday. He notes that consolidation of holdings would improve efficiency. Peasant farmers could grow more food using fewer resources and less energy, but they would be – to quote the adage – putting “all their eggs in one basket.”

If your time-averaged yield is marvelously high as a result of the combination of nine great years and one year of crop failure, you will still starve to death in that one year of crop failure before you can look back and congratulate yourself on your great time-averaged yield. Instead, the peasant’s aim is to make sure to provide a yield above starvation level in every single year, even though the time-averaged yield may not be highest.

What the efficiency-obsessed development experts didn’t appreciate was how fragile their consolidation strategy would make life for the peasant farmers. Instead of being ignorant, the peasants understood a spooky wisdom, insights gained over many lifetimes of trial and error experimentation. The farmers who didn’t scatter their plots died. Those who didn’t have enough plots also died. The farmers who survived had lots of scattered plots, a strategy for survival they passed on as traditional wisdom.

The development experts were trying to meet a single objective – increasing efficiency – while the peasants were forced to harmonize many competing objectives in an infinite game, one where survival was the ultimate constraint.

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That text is an excerpt from Chapter 5 of my book, Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity. In that chapter, titled Growth or Stability, I go over the logically seductive ways in which, in the decades since the onset of the Great Depression, Americans systematically traded away their stability for just a little more growth.

I wrote a story for the book that I ultimately cut. I don’t even have it anymore, but it has crossed my mind a lot these past few days, so I’m going to try and recreate it.

My wife and I got married in December of 2015 and built a house the next year. As we were going through the planning process, everyone advising us — including the bank making the construction loan — encouraged us to build bigger. What was originally a 24-foot wide home ended up being 40-feet wide, the logic of adding another four feet here and there seemingly obvious. The main reason was resale value. My wife and I ended up living in a four bedroom, three bathroom, home with a huge attached garage for eight years before our first daughter was born. That’s a ridiculous amount of space, even with kids.

We had only been living in the finished house a few weeks when my wife’s grandfather came to visit for Christmas. He would pass away a couple of years later in his mid 90’s, so this was a man born around 1900. I don’t know the man’s history (he married my wife’s grandmother after she had given birth to my father-in-law, so he wasn’t in the official family tree, so to speak), so I don’t know what his family had lived through or had a sense of the lessons they might have imparted. I do know that he lived through World War I, the roaring ‘20’s, the stock market crash, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War period that followed. This was a man with a lot of life experience. He had lived through trying times.

I had designed our house to have a large, open, 20-foot ceiling when you walked in the front door. The floor plan was of a cabin in the woods, and so I had finished the ceiling with pine. It was impressive to look at, and when my wife’s grandfather walked through the door, he just stared up at the ceiling.

Then he walked up the steps. He wasn’t walking well and we didn’t expect him to do the stairs, but he insisted. He kept expressing to my wife how impressed he was. Things like, “This is beautiful, just amazing.” My wife and I were proud — we had worked really hard on it, doing a lot of the work ourselves — so we were appreciating his kind words.

Then, and I’ll never forget this, about a third of the way up the steps he stopped and took my wife’s two hands in his and, shaking them triumphantly, said to her, “You’ve really made it. Wow! You really made it.”

He thought we owned the house. He didn’t realize how indebted we were, how we pushed the limits of what we were able to afford during the construction process. He didn’t know we were struggling to make the payments, giving up many other things so we could live in that house. I felt deeply ashamed.

This was a man who lived in a modest little house in a small town, something a third the size of ours. I didn’t know him well, but I saw a lot of the frugal behaviors of my own Depression-era grandparents in him. He drove an old car. He wore old clothes. He didn’t waste food. He assumed the best of us, that the magnificence of our house didn’t represent an unaffordable extravagance but our good fortune and great success. You made it, but we hadn’t.

I’m going to respect the privacy of my wife’s family with the details (I don’t really know them anyway), but when my wife’s grandfather passed away it was discovered that he had a modest fortune. In his final years, he had donated significant money to the local hospital and other community organizations. He had means to live a life far more extravagant than I had witnessed in the decade I had known him. This wealth hadn’t come from an inheritance or any other type of windfall. It came from two things: regular savings and prudent living.

My own grandfather, a kind and generous man, rarely got angry with his grandkids, except when we were wasteful. My grandmother would keep the basement cellar stocked with pop for us kids to have at our pleasure (to our parents’ dismay), but if grandpa ever found a can abandoned yet half empty, he would get upset with us all. I used to find his reaction funny, but I’ve never gone without.

We would go on walks and he would send me down into the ditch to retrieve aluminum cans, absolutely dismayed people would throw them out. He wasn’t bothered by the littering. Those cans were worth money, and he was astounded that people would just throw away that cash. We’d take them home and crush them and, when he had a truckload, bring them into the recycling center for some cash. I didn’t appreciate then how the Great Depression had impacted him, an illiterate farm kid from a poor family in a backwoods part of rural Minnesota. He told me there were times he thought he might starve.

Here’s how I end Chapter 5 of my book:

In the past, growth served us. Today, we serve growth.

In the system we have evolved, the ideal citizen creates growth, not by saving and investing, but by consuming beyond their means. It matters little that this is ruinous to the individual, that such financial insecurity creates enormous levels of instability. Individual avarice is necessary for our national GDP to grow. Savings is punished with artificially low returns while debt is subsidized. Our individual value to the whole is based on our capacity, even our desire, to consume.

Local governments are bribed to take on unpayable long-term liabilities so that the national economy can experience growth today. In the name of efficiency, they are stripped of nearly all means of ingenuity. Our cities orient up the government food chain, allowing themselves to be positioned at the bottom, grateful for the crumbs they receive. This is backward.

To build Strong Towns, local leaders will need to take steps to opt out of these systems. This is difficult because it’s the water we all swim in, and the current gets stronger as things become more desperate. Still, if we are to truly serve the people in our communities, and by extension be there when we discover we need all seven of our scattered plots, we need a new path to prosperity.

Our cities must now intentionally sacrifice growth in order to have stability. In the infinite game we are playing, stability is a requirement, growth an option.

The best time to start taking steps to build a Strong Town was some time ago. The next best time is now. Keep doing what you can.

Since I’m not able to travel and share the Strong Towns message in person during this time, we’ve decided to do a live broadcast of our most popular presentations on Tuesdays over the upcoming weeks. We’re starting tomorrow with the Strong America Tour presentation. It’s free, and you can get registered here.

Top image from Wikimedia.