LEBENSRAUM: PARADOXICALLY, GROWTH MAY END WARSJulian L. Simon INTRODUCTION We should not permit Saddam Hussein's dangerous adventures to obscure a happy trend: War is becoming obsolete. The Persian Gulf shows that oil wells still are worth fighting for. But the traditional economic motive for war -- acquiring farmland -- has already just about disappeared. It's time to recognize this happy truth about contemporary life for advanced nations: Nowadays it doesn't pay to make war to get another nation's territory. And a sensible citizenry wouldn't even take a slice of another country as a gift. Few analysts, however, foresee a world in which countries lack material reasons to make war, even in the most distant future. Recently, political scientist John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago has argued that the lessening of tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union may increase danger in Europe, rather than heralding a reduced chance of war. But perhaps if we separate ourselves from notions about land and territoriality and population growth that have prevailed since the beginning of recorded history, notions that only now are beginning to be inappropriate, we may envision the diminution -- even if not the disappearance -- in casus belli. With fewer reasons to make war, there may be fewer wars. * * * Adolph Hitler assaulted Europe (and, indirectly, the whole world) with perhaps the worst catastrophe in history, since the Black Death, under the banner of a wrong doctrine about the relationship of population size to land area. He asserted that the German "people" would be better off with more "living room," and should go to war in order to get it. If he (or many Germans) had understood that his reasoning did not make economic sense, perhaps -- just perhaps -- he would not have taken the world into war. Hitler certainly had additional motives for going to war, such as aggrandizement and military position. But the idea of lebensraum certainly was important to him, as it has been throughout history. Hence I use that cataclysmic example to illustrate the falsity of the doctrine that more land for a nation is worth the price of a war, and to illuminate a process that is progressively reducing one of the motives for making war. This is the process: Population growth threatens shortages of resources, and especially sustenance. Impending shortages of food (and hence of land) cause a search for, and then discovery of, ways to mitigate the shortages. Typically, land-enhancing discoveries eventually cause humanity to enjoy greater availability of food than if population growth and pressure on resources had never occurred. This is the argument that follows: 1) Rhetoric about resource scarcity induced by population density has often contributed to international conflict, even if economics has not been the main motive in making war. 2) In the pre-modern era, war to obtain land and other natural resources may sometimes have been an economically sound policy. 3) Politicians and others in industrially-developed nations still believe that resources may be a casus belli. 4) But acquisition of land and other productive resources are no longer worth acquiring at the cost of war, leaving strategic considerations aside). RHETORIC ABOUT RESOURCE SCARCITY HAS HELPED MAKE WARS In Mein Kampf Hitler made clear the objective of "soil and territory as the goal of our foreign policy." This was the logic of his war aims: [W]e ...must ...guarantee the German nation the soil and territory to which it is entitled on this earth... we spill no citizen's blood except that out of it a thousand others are bequeathed to posterity. The soil and territory on which a race of German peasants will some day be able to beget sons sanction the investment of the sons of today, and will some day acquit the responsible statesmen of blood and guilt and national sacrifice... (italics in original) Hitler made clear that the relationship of population to land area was central in his thinking. He wrote about "the German people today, penned into an impossible area." And he specified that it was land for settlement (presumably engaged in agriculture) that he had in mind, "in the winning of land for settlement." Lest we judge Hitler to be simply a primitive thinker, let us note that the most celebrated economist of this century (though history may instead agree with Friedrich Hayek's assessment of him as the most destructive economist of all time) also thought that food, coal, and iron were central in European war and peace. In his famous 1920 book, Economic Consequences of the Peace, John Maynard Keynes wrote that the "population was greatly in excess of the numbers for which a livelihood was available ...the law of diminishing returns was at last reasserting itself...Europe cannot feed itself". The extent to which Keynes misunderstood the economic reality is shown in his assessment that "by 1914 the domestic requirements of the United States for wheat were approaching their production, and the date was evidently near when there would be an exportable surplus only in years of exceptionally favorable harvest". Of course not only land for food, and other economic factors, influence whether nations go to war. In his great study of war through the ages, Quincy Wright concluded that economic issues have not been the main cause of war, or even the dominant cause, "much less important than political ambitions, ideological convictions, technological change, legal claims, irrational psychological complexes, ignorance, and unwillingness to maintain conditions of peace in a changing world." And Alexander Hamilton, in the sixth of the Federalist Papers, vividly asserted the multiplicity of motivations leading to war. After detailing "The causes of hostility among nations...love of power or the desire of pre-eminence and dominion...the rivalships and competitions of commerce between commercial nations...the attachments, enmities, interests, hopes, and fears of leading individuals," he noted that: The celebrated Pericles, in compliance with the resentment of a prostitute, at the expense of much of the blood and treasure of his countrymen, attacked, vanquished, and destroyed the city of the Samnians... Because people fight for pride and passion does not imply that they do not also have economic issues in mind, however. Indeed, if economic issues do not matter to people, why would any leader use such arguments? Certainly there is plenty of historical evidence that countries have gone to war to obtain additional land. a) Gordon Childe asserted that land scarcity caused wars in prehistoric times. b) The Bible has the Jews attacking the Canaanite tribes to obtain a homeland. c) The settlers of the Americas made war on the Indians to gain cropland and ranchland. d) The U.S. warred with Mexico and Canada to expand its area. e) Blacks and whites fought for the land of Rhodesia. The Wall Street Journal reported that Zimbabwe's war wasn't just about voting rights and black men in parliament. "The war was all about land," says Moven Mahachi, Zimbabwe's minister for land resettlement. "People fought for land, they went to jail for land, they died for land." HOW VALUABLE ARE LAND AND OIL WELLS TO A DEVELOPED NATION? Why would a country want a larger land area? How might it benefit a nation to increase its land area? We must distinguish two kinds of situations in which nations historically have wanted more land: (l) Nations have wanted to conquer new lands in order to settle their own people on the agricultural land, or to exploit mines or other natural resources. This was the case with the Israelites. It also was the notion underlying the Hitler passages quoted earlier; Hitler wrote about the lands to the east as if they were empty, or to be emptied. (2) But nations have also wanted new lands along with their existing populations because of their existing populations, to increase national size for greater power and/or for increased markets. I shall argue later that the logic in the second case is a derivative of the logic in the first case, and if the first case no longer makes sense, the second will not make much sense either. Let us discuss the two situations in that order. Would even a gift of additional land on its borders or elsewhere benefit an industrialized nation by way of increased agricultural opportunities? Let us consider the U.S. as a prototype of developed nations. Certainly there would be some benefit if the U.S. suddenly had a strip of empty land 50 miles wide which now is Mexico or Canada. This land would be additional "capital" which some Americans could use in addition to their present land and other capital; it would expand some Americans' incomes somewhat and thereby increase the average income of the U.S. as a whole, besides increasing U.S. capacity to export food profitably. But would there be much benefit in this addition to the U.S.? The surprising answer is "no." Even with the vast size of the U.S. agricultural land at present, only about 2% of the U.S. work force now is employed on farms.5 Hence an increase in land area -- even if it were to double the size of the U.S. -- would change the occupational lives of only about 2% of the population. Furthermore, people in agriculture do not derive much higher (perhaps even lower) incomes from farming than do the average of other Americans (though this would be hard to figure on a per- hour basis). Therefore, people who would otherwise not live on farms but who would till the new land would not gain much by such an increment to U.S. agricultural land. We could put the matter in another and more precise fashion by asking: How much is all U.S. cropland land worth if a foreign buyer were to make us a fair offer for it, or if we would consider buying an equivalent amount of land from another country (but miraculously no further from us, so transportation costs can be ignored)? Calculate this way: Perhaps 3 percent of GNP comes from farms; a little less than half of that comes from field crops (the rest from livestock and products). One of the great ratios in economics (deriving from the Australian, Colin Clark) is that at all times and throughout the world -- ancient Rome, 1960's India, Australia at the beginning of the century, and so on -- the market value of a piece of agricultural land is roughly 3-4 times the gross value of a year's output. (Not relevant here is the value of urban land, and the value of farmland for tax purposes or for speculation on development and inflation, factors which much affect the price of some farmland in the U.S.) So about 7% of one year's national income is all that U.S. cropland is worth to us as a nation. The amount that we as a nation spend in two years for recreation plus one year's expenditure on tobacco (without even including expenditures on liquor) would cover the whole bill. It is rather clear, then, that as land -- and even as improved cropland, not just as virgin land, which is worth only a fraction as much as improved land -- the U.S. cropland would not be worth fighting even a minor war for, let alone a major war. Two years' peacetime expenditures on defense would pay the whole bill. Another way to evaluate the land is with something like Nobel prize-winner Theodore Schultz's method based on the estimate that "20% of the cost of producing farm products is net rent". If so, .20 x .02 (something more than the proportion of GNP arising from crops) = 0.4% of each year's GNP. Capitalizing this rent by a factor of about twenty yields an estimate of 8% of one year's GNP as the value of the land in agriculture. Data on the market value of farmland in the U.S. compiled by the U. S. Department of Agriculture imply estimates twice as high as do the methods described above for the period about 1978-1981. However, farmland prices were then unusually high due to transient factors (compared to Clark's ratio), and a sharp fall has occurred since then. But even if the appropriate value were as high as, say, 20% of one year's GNP rather than 7% or 8%, the thrust of the argument would not be affected. A developed country would still be economically crazy to go to war just for agricultural land, even to obtain as much land as the United States has. And less-developed countries are not in a position to start major wars without co-opting developed-country allies. Oil may still be valuable enough to be worth fighting for. Fears about oil supplies clearly matter in political thinking, and population growth is involved in those fears, as in a speech by Richard Cooper when he was the U.S. Undersecretary for Economic Affairs (and a well-known economist): I do see economic crisis in the 1980s unless we act decisively to avert it. I see economic events in the 1980s driven largely by two factors -- rapid growth of world population and inadequate supplies of oil at existing prices. Cooper even linked his statement to Hitler's thinking. After noting that world population would in the 1990's be twice what it was when he was born, he went on: Even at that time [between the two World Wars, some political leaders were complaining of congestion and calling for more lebensraum. And indeed, Saddam Hussein turned these fears about oil into reality in the summer of 1990. Nevertheless, when in the future energy costs will again have fallen to a very small part of GNP for developed nations, (as I argued in the Atlantic in 1980 and in my 1981 The Ultimate Resource), even oil will not be a casus belli. Empty land and naked resources have been the subject so far. But land with people on it is no more valuable or attractive than is empty land. When Canada seemed on the verge of breakup in the summer of 1990, columnist Pat Buchanan advocated the annexation of our northern neighbor. He wrote that "Canada's crisis contains opportunity for the United States" to carry out "the greatest geographical expansion...since James K. Polk annexed Texas, California, and the Southwest." He relishes the prospect of "an English-speaking nation extending from Key West to the North Pole". Such an expansion would mean an increase in readers for ol' Pat. But that would be about the only benefit, aside from a boost to our egos. U.S. citizens would not increase their capital per person if the Canadian owners were to stay where they are and continue to take whatever "rents" that the land provides. And there would be no other major economic benefit. Check with your intuition: How would you be better off economically if the U.S. jurisdiction suddenly included Canada (or Mexico)? The biggest effect would be negative -- more farms and farmers to subsidize. Certainly, anyone who prefers that Puerto Rico not be part of the U.S. for economic reasons should say "no" to Canada and Mexico as well. We see this principle in operation when cities and towns are not anxious to annex additional outlying areas; the principle is not different for the nation. Nor are there non-agricultural land-connected reasons to attack another country to gain territory, to wit: Kings in the past have thought to conquer territory in order to farm its taxes exploitively. And cities are happy to annex areas that will improve the tax base. But at the level of national conquest, nowadays, this would require taxing some areas within the enlarged country at different rates than other areas, or providing services at different levels to different areas, or both. Otherwise there would be no benefits through taxation for the conqueror. And this sort of inequality would be very hard to sustain in a modern country unless the conquered persons were made serfs tied to the land. Another possible land-connected reason to make war is access to larger markets so as to achieve economies of size in production. But custom unions and abolition of tariffs accomplish the same end just as well. More generally, tariff walls are likely to seem decreasingly attractive as the numbers of producers of goods grow with increasing world development and with improved transportation, and as each country needs trade reciprocity to sell its own goods. What about military power as a reason for war? A larger population that comes with territorial acquisition implies larger potential armed forces. This certainly is a cogent argument -- as long as one lives in a world where other countries might want to attack you. But as the economic reasons for making war decline, the military reasons for making war to increase military power should also decline. Another possible reason for wanting more land other than for farming is for urban people to feel less crowded in housing and other living space. But there is almost no connection between the total land area of the country a person lives in, or even the land area per person, and the sense of crowding. The most important space element seems to be the size of a person's home in square feet of floor space. And if each person were to have to himself or herself two rooms measuring l5 feet by l5 feet -- a great many people patently do not feel crowded in luxury apartments with that much space, which is many times more space than Abraham Lincoln had in the log cabin in which he grew up -- and if high-rise housing were built to well below the height of the Sears Building in Chicago or the World Trade Tower in New York or even the Empire State Building, l55 million people could live on Manhattan Island and l.59 billion within the land area of New York City, even leaving 20% of the land area for streets, parks, and buildings other than housing. Still another non-reason for wanting to conquer another nation nowadays is acquisition of its stock of assets. Perhaps in pre-historic times it made some sense for a nomad tribe to defeat and expel the inhabitants of a "city" in order to take over its dwellings and utensils. But nowadays there would be no benefit in such a move. Though the physical stock of houses and factories of country A might be of value to the inhabitants of country B if the assets could be moved to a place of country B's choosing (the way the Germans in World War II moved some Russian factory machinery), it is unlikely that any country today could profit much from such rapine; without the transportation and communication sinews, and the mode of economic organization that has evolved together with the buildings and machinery, the physical assets are likely to be worth little to an invader. If the conquering country is as rich as the conquered, it already has a stock of assets with which its population already works. Exchanging all the old stock -- or even part of it -- for a new and strange stock of assets is not likely to increase the output of its citizens much, if at all. Keeping the conquered inhabitants in place and forcing them to work for you also is not very effective, as Hitler learned. Conquering and then exploiting by taxation is not impossible, but at least in the most recent case of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (where that may or may not have been part of the original motivation), it has not worked out that way. In short, conquering an equally- developed country by war is not likely to be a profitable business nowadays. The notion of a poor population taking over the developed world, as dramatized in Raspail's Camp of the Saints, is even less plausible. The uneducated poor demonstrably have no capacity to operate the instruments of a modern society, or else they would not be poor. A "horde" of them moving into and taking over a rich country would soon find herdsmen sheltering themselves and their flocks in computer factories, which as shelter are not worth warring over. As someone once remarked, if Indians and Americans exchanged territories, in a few decades the U.S. would look like India now, and India like the U.S. This is simply because the stock of human capital embodied in the education and skills and productive culture of a population is overwhelmingly important, as the post-World War II recovery experiences of Japan and Germany demonstrated well. (On the other hand, if Indian newborns and American newborns exchanged educational upbringings at birth, the countries also would exchange appearances very rapidly.) Furthermore, the notion of the ragged poor being able to take over a rich country by violence, in the face of vastly superior weapons, is plainly ridiculous. It is true that it would be nice for a nation to have lots of open space with low tourist density close at hand to its cities, and for that reason a country like the Netherlands or Israel may feel a desire for adjacent land. But with the decreasing cost of transportation, and the consequent opportunity for middle-class families to vacation in open desert or arctic or tropic jungle (or even in space, in the not-so-distant future), this consideration simply does not seem to be a likely cause of future war. Still another reason for wanting more non-farm land is as a military buffer or staging ground. But again, if war is not in the cards for other reasons, this reason, too, withers away. The most complex reasons for wanting more land -- and the most difficult to remove, because they are not economic -- are psychological. The land area of a country -- especially when more population accompanies the added land, as is the case after a conquest -- has always symbolized more power. And power is heady. For modern nations, the satisfaction arising from possession of land may be in large part a simple confusion arising from an unsound analogy between individual ownership and national ownership. An individual who owns much land is rich because he or she can sell the land; the land is wealth to the individual. But nowadays it is not practical for a nation to sell land the way Louisiana and Alaska were sold to the U.S.). Therefore, land does not represent wealth to a nation as it does to an individual. And simply drawing a boundary line so as to include additional area and persons does not change national wealth at all, as discussed earlier. LONG-RUN CAUSE: POPULATION GROWTH AND DENSITY The history-reversing process that has been leading to this new vista of war and peace arises out of the combination of increased income per person and the almost-definitional accompanying decline in the proportion of persons working in agriculture. If only 3% of the income of a nation and less than 3% of its labor force is agricultural -- the state of even as agricultural a developed country as the U.S. -- then the quantity of agricultural land obviously is not important enough from an economic point of view to fight about. Paradoxically, the long- run cause of this process is population growth. The mechanism is this: Additional people lead to actual or expected shortages and increased economic burdens in the short run. But in a fashion that I describe at length in my 1981 The Ultimate Resource, these economic problems eventually lead to increases in technology, due to both the "demand side" increase in payoff to invention and the "supply side" increase in potential inventors in the larger population. And there is no reason to expect this process not to continue indefinitely. (The speed with which the response occurs may vary greatly from society to society, of course; the comparison between China and Europe as of, say, 1700 may serve as an example.) Doom-and-gloom Malthusianism doubts countries' capacity to feed increased populations. But productivity per farm worker has increased so greatly that an ever-smaller number of farm workers in developed countries produces food for an ever-larger population, and larger amounts of food per consumer to boot. Continuation of the present trend to the same absurd limit as Malthusian doomsday scares would eventually have just one person farming all the land in the U.S. and feeding everyone else. Where will this benign trend stop? No one knows. But as long as agriculture is pointed in this economically desirable direction, we need not be concerned about how long it can go on, especially as there are no obvious technological forces to stop it. While countries are still poor they cannot embark on a course of mechanization sufficiently intense to increase total output and at the same time reduce the total number of workers in agriculture. But at least the proportion of workers in agriculture falls, as is already happening in almost every developing country despite population growth. And eventually the absolute number of farm workers is likely to fall, too. This is not happening yet, but the poorer countries can expect eventually to experience the same trend that was at work in the past in the now-rich countries. Nor is there physical limit upon capacity. If the need should arise, processes such as hydroponics can produce incredible amounts of food in tiny compass of space, even without soil. This is already commercially viable under special conditions. The Archer-Daniels-Midland firm in Decatur, Illinois is now building a commercial facility to raise vegetables hydroponically under glass in order to take advantage of water, CO2, and heat by-products from its food processing operations. There are about a dozen hydroponic farms on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. that sell vegetables profitably during the winter -- without subsidy. And in the early days of Israel, that nation developed successful experimental hydroponics agriculture because its planners worried about the capacity of its small territory to be self-sufficient in food. But that line of development was not pursued simply because the rapidly-increasing productivity of its farms -- using conventional agricultural methods -- was more than sufficient to resolve the food problem for the foreseeable future. Difficulty would only arise if these new land-saving agricultural processes were to require so much labor as to again constitute a relatively large proportion of the population. But we have seen that the trend has gone the other way. Nor is there convincing reason to believe that the trend will reverse in the future. The simple fact is that in the long run, land becomes relatively less important to farming, as Theodore Schultz pointed out in a more limited context way back in l95l, and as Justus Liebig and Karl Marx discussed from a technological point of view in the nineteenth century. In fact, all natural resources become less important for production as technology advances, because of our remarkable ability to substitute one material for another in production processes -- for example, aluminum in place of copper in electrical wiring, space satellites instead of copper telephone wires, and plastic shoes instead of leather. CONCLUSIONS Can it be true that some day war will lose enough of its attraction so that it will become a much lesser danger than in the past and present? Or is this another utopian pipe dream? The answer depends upon the importance of economic considerations in national decisions. Ironically, all haters of war should pray that humans are very materialistic in their motives, as compared to their devotion to their religious or cultural heritage or even to aesthetic values, because sound calculation of the economic benefit-cost ratio of war would result in the decision not to begin a war. There is little reason to doubt that land for productive purposes will have steadily decreasing value to nations (as a proportion of GNP) with the passage of time during which there will take place population growth, technological growth, and increased income. In the same way, aside from its resale value, a piece of land is economically worthless to you and to me (as to most residents of rich countries) because we can earn less working the land to produce food than we can earn working producing other goods with other capital. And the same picture will increasingly emerge even for such resources as oil. This trend for oil works to remove the cause of struggle between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the Middle East. But this trend does nothing to reduce the desire of many Arabs to make successful war on Israel, because that desire is motivated by hate and sentimental attachment to the land. Nor would this trend reduce the desire of many Israelis to hold onto the West Bank of what was Jordan before l967 because of religious- historical-sentimental attachment to many places there, as well as because of military advantages and aesthetic appreciation of that area (as also was the case with other portions of land Israel conquered in l967 but has since returned to Egypt). So, in brief, to the extent that economics matters, it is indeed realistic that the probability of war will decrease in the future. And in the long run, population growth speeds that process. Just how important economics is, and ought to be, in national decisions is a matter that must be left to others to discuss. lebatlan 0-200 article0 2-13-1 /page 1/article0 lebatlan/February 13, 1991 4Blainey argues persuasively that "it is the problem of accurately measuring the relative power of nations which goes far to explain why wars occur. War is a dispute about the measurement of power. War marks the choice of a new set of weights and measures." (1973, p. 114) But this view is not at odds with the argument offered here. It is the subject of disputes that is of interest here, and the subject can be economic or non-economic. 5This is written in awareness that some industrial workers make products used in farming. But these workers do not affect the argument, because they could continue as they are, selling their wares to "foreign" owners of the farmland. Readers wishing information on the "about 2%" assertion may write the reader for documentation. 6I am not advocating any particular level of expenditures for defense. The long-run argument made here has absolutely no bearing on short-run political decisions, as I see it. 7Bertrand Russell put it thusly: [I]t cannot be expected that the most powerful military nations will sit still while other nations reverse the balance of power by the mere process of breeding (1929/1959, p. 169). 8After this article was composed, I found that Shepherd (1986) has written about U.S.-U.S.S.R. relations in quite the same spirit as underlays this article. Using rough calculations of such concepts as national income, investments, military spending, and possible returns from plunder, he persuasively concludes that there is no economic rationale for conquest or domination of either country by the other. Such "immobile" resources as farmland, forests, buildings, and coal mines are not even enough of a factor for him to consider in his reckoning (p. 29). For the special case he discusses, distance is a key element, and hence acceptance of Shepherd's argument does not imply acceptance of the argument expressed here, though the two arguments tend to support each other. 9Those who fear population growth because they believe that it leads to increased conflict -- an example is Margaret Sanger, who made the war issue a key element in her birth-control movement, along with eugenics (e. g. pp. 254, 420) -- may be calling for policies that are counter-productive in the long run. In the long run, population control as such may slow the trend toward greater resource availability and hence less propensity for war. /page 2/article0 lebatlan/February 13, 1991 A Malthusian would presume that were the population of Europe smaller at that time, the conflicts might well have been mitigated; or that had there been room for further expansion, peace would have likely continued. Rarely in history do events permit such suppositions to be examined. However, the event that subsequently removed a sizeable portion of the population indicated that what Europeans really needed was not a reduction in population but a change in social institutions and economic structure. In the middle of the fourteenth century the Bubonic Plague -- the Black Death -- struck Europe, killing between a quarter to a third of the population (and more in places) in about three years. The Black Death was followed by periodic lesser and more localized epidemics over the next several decades. The resulting depopulation assured that there would be little or no population pressure for two centuries to come. As Europe recovered from the plague, the survivors could have considered themselves quite fortunate. Empty farms were available for the taking. The capital stock was large, having been geared to the size of a larger population. Opportunities for advancement were easier than in the days of internal colonization when marshes had to be drained. Many peasants were able to achieve yeoman status as lords found it dificult to find people to work their domains. In England, real wages increased until the battle of Agincourt (1415) and held steady for a century thereafter. Increased wages may have been due as much to the quantities of unused capital developed by the previous generation and to the demand, generated by wars, for military manpower and material, as to a dearth of labor. Despite the available opportunities in civilian life, there was little trouble in recruiting mercenaries as the tempo of war and domestic violence increased in a relatively underpopulated Europe, in which land and resources were plentiful. Within depopulated England, a wave of internal violence was climaxed by the Rising of 1381, little more than a generation after the Black Death. While wages rose and feudal services and work dues were remitted to cash payments for some peasants, even to their achieving yeomen status, many lords attempted by force to reinstitute feudal dues, keep their peasants tied to the land in serfdom, and otherwise turn back the clock. Parliament enacted "Statutes of Laborers," setting ceilings on wages and limiting the rights of the laborers to leave one job for another. The Rising of 1381, though it ended largely in failure, was as successful a peasant revolt as the English were to experience. Rustic rebels joined Londoners to take that capital city. They beheaded the Archbishop of Canterbury and massacred foreign artisans, the competitors of English artisans, who were in short supply. The revolt was pacified by the granting of royal concessions including the commutation of feudal servile dues. Most concessions were revoked when the leaders were slain and order was restored. But peace did not come to England. Though there remained a glut of land and a dearth of people for a century or two, internal disorder and violence, of which the campaigns of the Wars of the Roses were but a small part, characterized the times. The year 1450 saw another major peasants' revolt, led by John Cade. Brigandage was rife and even landed proprietors attacked each others' holdings. Recourse to court and jury provided no relief because these institutions were easily bought or intimidated. In depopulated France, a much more oppressive and rapacious nobility, less controlled by the crown than their English counterparts, drove peasants to engage in terrorism and destructive risings -- called the Jacqueries -- often without program or leadership. The violence experienced by England and France was not limited to internal disorders. The Hundred Years War, which began in 1337, eleven years before the plague, was halted by a truce a few months before the Black Death, resumed soon after the plague ran its course, and continued well into the fifteenth century. In central Europe, the violence of the fifteenth century was epitomized by the rebellion of radical Hussites. These millenarians, part of the revolutionary chiliastic movement traced by Cohn (as noted earlier), defeated imperial armies and were responsible for much slaughter before they were overcome. They helped lay the foundation for the later Protestant Reformation and the peasant and religious wars which followed. The increasing tendency to violence noted at the end of the thirteenth century, and attributed by some to the press of population on resources -- the closing of the medieval frontier, was not mitigated when population pressure was relieved, even after the shock and dislocations of the Black Death had run their course. -------------------- from Lebensraum 86-111 The "about 2%" statement is based on the following data (all from U.S. Dept. of Commerce, 1986, and all referring to 1984 for comparability): Of the 97,632,000 persons in the full-time civilian labor force (113,544,000 part-time) in 1984 (p. 394), 1,464,000 were employed in agriculture. Among the 63,835,000 males in the full-time and part-time labor force, 1,163,000 were employed in agriculture (p. 634). There were 2,315,000 farm family members doing one or more hours of work on the farm during the survey week, perhaps half of whom were primarily employed outside of agriculture, plus l,373,000 hired persons working one or more hours (p. 633). Of the 115,241,000 persons in the total labor force (including armed forces) in 1984, 3,321,000 were classified as in "agriculture" (Council of Economic Advisers, 1987, p. 280). Much of the agricultural labor is devoted to animal raising, which is not relevant here. A more precise discussion would distinguish between cropland, grazing land, and forest land, but for the purposes of this discussion such precision is not necessary; the estimates given are illustrative only. From Cooper: And he then spells this out in detail: [T]here will be population pressure against agricultural land. This will lead to domestic and international conflict...increased population will lead to vast increases in demand for food and paid employment to sustain life. save for refs John Maynard Keynes wrote that the "population was greatly in excess of the numbers for which a livelihood was available (pp. 25-26)...the law of diminishing returns was at last reasserting itself (p. 25)...Europe cannot feed itself (p. 227). The extent to which Keynes misunderstood the economic reality is shown by his assessment that "by 1914 he domestic requirements of the United States for wheat were approaching their production, and the date was evidently near when there would be an exportable surplus only in years of exceptionally favorable harvest" (p. 24). /page 3/article0 lebatlan/February 13, 1991