Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

from
The Metastasis of Money
http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
John Michael Greer

Until the dawn of the industrial age, as a general rule of thumb, some 90% of 
the inhabitants of any complex society worked in agriculture, providing the 
food and raw materials that supported themselves as well as the 10% who could 
be spared for all other economic roles. By 1900, at the zenith of the age of 
coal, many nations in the industrial world had dropped the percentage of 
their work force in agriculture below 50%, and shifted the workers thus freed 
up into a broad assortment of new economic roles. By 2000, buoyed by the much 
higher concentration and efficiency of petroleum, many industrial nations had 
dropped the percentage of their work force in agriculture below 5%, with the 
other 95% filling newly invented roles in the most complex economies in the 
history of the planet.

One consequence of this swift and unprecedented surge in complexity was the 
triumph of money over all other systems of exchange. When the vast majority 
of workers at every income level labored at tasks so specialized that their 
efforts only produced value when combined with those of hundreds or thousands 
of other workers, money provided the only way they could receive a return on 
their labor. When most of the customers for any given product had money and 
nothing else to exchange for it, buying products for money became standard. 
Social networks of exchange – household economies, customary local exchanges, 
church and fraternal networks– shattered under the strain, and were replaced 
by purely economic relationships – wage labor, shopping, public assistance – 
that could be denominated entirely in cash. The last three centuries of 
social and economic history are largely a chronicle of the results.