Economics - roots and food

Xenophon wrote the first economics book as a treatise on how an Athenian nobleman should best manage his estate. It is often useful, when thingking about big questions of resource allocation in the World economy, to return to the Socratic simplicity of that context. If the world were your estate, what would you be doing?

Ischomachus has a small mediterranean estate. To make it more like the world, assume it is self-sufficient and does not trade. His good husbandry has made the estate rich, and he has promoted in rank many laborers who are now productive artisans and managers. With their rise in station has come a taste for the good things in life - lighting oil, meat three times a week amongst others. Demand for food and energy are up. What is more, Ischomachus has got it into his head that some of his grain should be turned into alcohol for burning. The tar-pit he has used before is running low and no one likes the acrid black smoke burning it produces.

All this adds up to trouble for Ischomachus in his idylic estate. While it used to be pretty easy for him to parcel out food according to everyone's expectations, he now finds that once he has distributed food to his family, his lieutenants, managers and other important people; once he has diverted some of it to his alcohol programme, those at the end of the queue are still hungry after their rations are eaten. Ischomachus does not even have any stocks left to wait and hope for a better harvest next year. His workers and their families are getting so jumpy that there are parts of his estate he is worried to walk through without weapons. He even has a nasty suspicion that some of the cannier managers are hoarding grain to profit later.

Martin Wolf, judging by his analysis of today's problems, would give this advice to Ischomachus:

1. Help out the poor by cutting back a small amount on the lifestyle you offer your senior staff
2. check the running of your estate carefully. Are there any places where you are reducing the amount that could be produced because of someone's pet project. Yours on alcohol, for example ...or your wife's attachment to wild flowers and thick hedgerows ...make sure that these schemes are cut back as much as you can without losing the support of your household.
3. Get thinking for ways to increase your production. Why is that land over there lying idle? Couldn't this piece produce more?

Paul Collier agrees with Martin Wolf's general line, and adds the observation that the problem is a sign of how much has gone right with the management of the estate. So many laborers have risen by their ability in rank to more productive members of the estate and have adopted the land-intensive meat tastes due to their station. Paul Collier strongly reinforces Martin Wolf's second recommendation: go after the non-food supply interests that are lurking in the estate's management. It is more important to feed your people than to keep outmoded privileges for the few.

Even if Ischomachus might have nodded along with Wolf and Collier, I hope an alert Socrates would have pulled them up. You can feed six times as many vegetarians as carnivores on the estate. If the fillet-mignon loving elite would eat meat with half the frequency they do now, the poor of the estate would not go hungry.

``Now'', Socrates might ask, ``can you make your elite and rising stars vergetarian--those who are eating meat less frequently--without issuing heavy-handed dictats? Without Ischomachus becoming estate Nanny?'' Can we all be both vegetarian and libertarian? The environmental movement teaches us how hard this is. Policy--like a meat tax or a carbon tax--and consciousness have to move hand in hand because policy without support is fragile, and consciousness without collective policy falls to free-riding.

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