Things are the way there are for a reason...
Economics assumes that people act rationally
and in their self-interest. Self-interest is definitively not greed - but
rather individuals acting in an enlightened awareness of goals, costs and
benefits. We all know the story of the potato famine in Ireland but other
than french fries and Thanksgiving hardly give them a second thought. For
instance, where did potatoes come from? They came to the Old World
(Europe) from the New World (the America's) along with maize or corn,
sweet potatoes, tomatoes, peanuts, manioc, cacao, and various kinds of peppers,
beans and squashes.
Historians have wrestled with two questions
concerning the introduction and proliferation of potatoes in the Old World:
1) Why would Old World farmers give up familiar routines and crop
rotations to make way for a strange plant imported from the New World
that requires rather strenuous cultivation during the growing season
to keep weeds down?
2) Why start to eat something unfamiliar, untried, and untested that cooks
and tastes so different relative to the traditional foods of the Old World?
Let's use a model of rational self-interest to
explain this aspect of human history and behavior.
Potatoes had some very fundamental advantages:
1) In the northern European plains, rye was the traditional crop because is
could grow in the short and wet growing season. Potatoes thrive in this environment.
2) Potatoes produce more caloric value per acre - up to 4 times the caloric
value per acre compared to rye. Population was growing and these extra calories
were needed to support that growing population.
3) Rye required the fallowing or rotation of fields. If a grain is planted
year-after-year, weeds become a major problem during the off-season and the
fields must be hoed or plowed to plant the grains. Potatoes had to be hoed
two to three times a planting period. So, "Grow rye or grow potatoes - you
still have to hoe." Growing potatoes added no more hoeing (at the margin),
but it did provide additional food and calorie production.
4) Potatoes provided a good number of minerals and vitamins -- they were bland
-- but they were a well-rounded food and source of carbohydrates.
5) Ripe grains were harvested and stored in barns until used.
a) Stored grains led to problems with vermin - namely, rats. Rats could eat
up to half of a stored crop.
b) Stored grains led to problems with the tax collector. The stores provided
a convenient and easy target for tax collectors and the ensuing government-chosen
level of government confiscation.
c) Stored grains led to problems with plunder. Marauding armies, and there
were many, would simply confiscate the grains and leave. Wartime "requisition"
could starve an entire village.
What advantage did potatoes provide relative to grains for tax and plunder avoidance?
They could be left in the ground until ready to eat. The taxman couldn't count
them, the army wouldn't dig them, and the farmer had a food supply hidden from
both! In a world of enlightened self-interest, potatoes became a form of insurance
against starvation for Old World farmers.
Source: McNeil, William H. "American
Food Crops in the Old World." in Seeds of Change: A Quincentennial
Commemoration, Herman J. Viola and Carolyn Margolis, Editors.
Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington and London, 1991.
©
Bradley K. Hobbs, Ph.D. 2001. All written portions
of this work are those of Bradley K. Hobbs and his alone.
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"Capitalism" by Ayn Rand.)
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