"The Industrial Revolution put farmers out of work, but not because farming became illegal"

Not completely true, see the Inclosure Acts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts

It's not unique to England either, it's just well documented there. Generally speaking the process of removing subsistence hunters, herders and farmers off of land they have historically lived off takes place with violence - not because they can't pay the rent anymore.

Additionally, the claim on the land of the people who are generally doing the displacing is usually questionable at best...

This isn't a matter of history either, taking land held in common by indigenous people with little if any recompense is a process that continues today in many parts of the world.

>>The Industrial Revolution put farmers out of work, but not because farming became illegal

>Not completely true, see the Inclosure Acts

I don't think that's disputing the parent's point. Seizing land isn't "banning farming" any more than repoing my car is "banning driving".

To respond to the general point: if yeoman farming were actually more productive per unit input, then even enclosure wouldn't be enough to stamp it out. Displaced farmers would still have been able to buy back the original land and continue: the new owners would see the offer price as being better than the capitalized returns they could make, and some bank would have seen the business plan and interest payments as being enough to merit a loan.

"if yeoman farming were actually more productive per unit input, then even enclosure wouldn't be enough to stamp it out."

I'm not making the claim that yeoman farming is more productive. I do claim however that such laws are sufficient to crush indigenous agriculture because enclosure is a violent and effective process for doing so.

"Seizing land isn't "banning farming""

Enclosure laws aren't a ban (no society has ever banned farming to my knowledge), but they effectively put some farmers out of work if they engage in a particular type of subsistence agriculture. That is farmers that utilize a community owned shared hunting ground/pasture/cropland on land without a title recognized by the state.

"Displaced farmers would still have been able to buy back the original land and continue"

Your typical indigenous person or tribe who is having their land enclosed or confiscated doesn't have the capital to buy it back, assuming they are even have the knowledge, language and legal framework on how to go about with that process. They are likely not even interested in agriculture for the purpose of making money, and if they were, do you really imagine people like the Orang Rimba are going to buy back their land? http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41981430 It's going to be palm oil plantations no matter how effectively they were using the land - assuming anyone is even measuring.

Funnily enough, my own (long term) project is aimed at addressing the problem you're pointing out. Given the possibility of remote work, there's no insurmountable reason why the only land worth living in should be concentrated in a few urban centers.

https://sites.google.com/s/0BzzRwqIB2K0dSWhkTXBSTTltTDg/p/0B...

> Given the possibility of remote work, [...] urban centers.

Even HN doesn't yet seem to be discussing the impact of coming VR/AR on people's geographic distribution.

Perhaps it's still too low profile? Eye tracking; facial expression tracking (researchy); foveated rendering reducing GPU requirements; inexpensive laptops with discrete GPUs; HMDs with monitor-like angular resolution; inexpensive finger tracking (hopefully)... perhaps it's easy to not notice these if you're not tracking the tech? Easy to think "remote work, so video conferencing, so limited impact - far better to do open plan offices"? Instead of "the practice and spatial constraints of software development will change dramatically over the next half decade".

Or maybe even just an always-on video setup. Basically use the following innovations to connect an office in SF with one in Fresno:

1.) MIT Stanford Wormhole http://archive.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2011/...

The designers of the installation, who call it the wormhole, say it is meant to encourage random encounters between students and staff at two of the country’s premier technology-oriented universities. Someone at MIT’s Stata Center for Computer, Information, and Intelligence Sciences, hungry for lunch and conversation, will be able to chat under the dome with a stranger who’s grabbing a morning coffee in Stanford’s Huang Engineering Center. Casual meetings can be held at the wormhole. New ideas may be spurred, new science inspired.

2.) Google Fiber

3.) 200 inch LED video wall https://www.engadget.com/2018/01/07/samsung-4k-146-inch-micr...

> Or maybe even just an always-on video

Or perhaps video in addition to XR? HMDs don't entirely play well with eyes (at least until we get adaptive optics or light fields), so I want to give my eyes a break periodically. A video wall in the kitchen would permit a "let's take a break" conversation with a non-local colleague.

The power of the XR argument, is that if your ideal development environment is XR, and your ideal collaboration context is via XR, then locality constraints have simply gone away. Rather than video's challenge of being an impoverished medium, which may or may not be worth some non-locality benefit.

> MIT Stanford Wormhole

I spent a lot of time in Stata, over may years, and I'm not sure I ever saw the "wormhole" used. But perhaps there was some pattern of use, like late lunch, which I systematically missed. And one can walk by the cafeteria without easily noticing.

Or for that matter self driving cars. You could commute for 5 hours a day, spend 2 hours in the office and go home again. All while being productive. That greatly increases the commutable range. Then you have the prospect of self driving Motor homes, moving with the work becomes that much easier.

People take commuter buses with wifi, from Pennsylvania to NYC, with a 2 to 4 hour round trip. A few commute Boston to NYC on Amtrak Acela, with a 7-ish hour round trip (you can stand up and walk around, get coffee, etc).

How will we be able to do this without fossil fuels?

I don't understand what problem VR/AR is solving in your hypothetical.

Not the OP, but I've been thinking about this a lot recently.

The problem is that telecommuting is currently very limited by technology. You can currently only transport your voice and a single video view, while collaborating over a single view from a monitor. You end up missing on very many of the modalities available in the real world.

But my vision of what work and study could be like with good VR is The Magic School Bus. Assume that every time you an your colleagues wanted to do work on any domain, you would be transported into a hi-fi all-senses-included representation of that domain, which provides a perfect sense of presence. That technology is still quite far away, but once we're there, it would be significantly better than just being in a room with them. And the world would be forever changed.

so: constricted communication bandwidth?

That's one way to describe it, a better way might be that's its not bandwidth that limits remote working communication, but just a lack of features.

To loop this back to the topic at hand, the idea is that you need people in the same space to work effectively. That idea forces collections of people (cities) and drives up the value of the land (a fixed commodity). Having technology that removes the need to have the workforce physically opens up vast amounts of relatively cheap land to live on.

I think the efficiency gain from cities is more than just some people working in a single company, but all sorts of logistical savings.

Perhaps my imagination isn't big enough, but I just don't see VR replacing dasein as it were.

> efficiency gain from cities

Sure. It's just that "tolerable commute" would no longer need to be one of those gains.

A fun conversation went by with someone from the Sierra Club. It was pointed out that the built environment which best matched their resource conservation/efficiency goals, was Manhattan. Their response was something like "yes, but we don't emphasize that, because it wouldn't appeal to our membership". ;)

> dasein

Picture brainstorming in front of a hallway whiteboard. Picture grabbing some nearby colleagues to collaborate. Now picture how relatively ineffective and unpleasant it would to do that collaboration over video conferencing and such. It's suboptimal, but that's a price you're sometimes willing to pay for non-locality. But now imagine that given a choice, you would much prefer to be brainstorming in front of a virtual whiteboard.[1] And collaborating there. Simply because it's a more powerful and helpful environment. So your physical whiteboard languishes, gets taken down for wall painting, and is never rehung. Then non-locality is no longer something you pay for. Locality constraints are just gone.

There's a fun decades-old metric on communication technology: Given some communication task, and a choice of technologies, how far would you walk to get access to them? Physical letter, email, phone, in-person conversation. Down the hall, different floor, different building, across the city.

Already, there are some tasks where even if you are sitting in the same office, you would use some tech rather than turning around. VR/AR seems likely to greatly increase that set of tasks. Reducing the importance of being able to physically walk to people.

[1] Here's a limited existing virtual whiteboard: http://store.steampowered.com/app/585040/Dry_Erase_Infinite_...

> there's no insurmountable reason why the only land worth living in should be concentrated in a few urban centers.

There's actually a very fundamental reason why land perceived as being worth living in becomes an urban center, and remote work doesn't change most of the climate, water, resource distribution, etc., reasons why particular sites are much more attractive for human habitation.

Can you provide a working link please? This is something I've been thinking about a lot, would like to learn more about what you are thinking.

oops, thanks for the heads up.

https://sites.google.com/view/virtuouscycleinvestment/projec...

> there's no insurmountable reason why the only land worth living in should be concentrated in a few urban centers.

IMHO, one very insurmountable reason is that you could never convince everyone that an urban center is worth living in. Quite a few people just don't enjoy that lifestyle.

I think you read that wrong. Paraphrasing what you said: Some people not liking to live in cities is an insurmountable reason that land in city centers is the only land worth living in.

First, your response doesn't make sense (and I think it's just because it's a misreading of the comment you replied to).

Second, I agree, there are people (myself included) that wouldn't enjoy living in an urban center. But that doesn't address what I think the comment was getting at, which is that land in urban centers is more desirable to a greater number of people than land outside of them.

403 forbidden.

My bad.

https://sites.google.com/view/virtuouscycleinvestment/projec...

This would be a wonderful thesis if it didn't ignore the fact that in the world (and the US in particular) there's a lot of land. So much land that you could fit the entire world's population twice into Texas alone assuming major city densities (assuming 67k /mi^2 and 268000 mi^2 per cursory googling gives some 18B).

As maxerickson said, that land is not free. And the question is not the amount of land, but the amount of valuable land. Land that is near jobs, near markets, near ports, or near decent hospitals or schools.

Sure there's loads of terrible land in West Texas, which could possibly provide for a lifestyle of subsistence farming, but the US standard of living is such that it would be wiser to live on welfare in a city.

But in theory, if someone could covertly farm some crops on one of the numerous vacant sites in Manhattan, and not have to pay any rent, then that same amount of subsistence labor could provide for a potentially decent lifestyle.

Same amount of effort would bring in a much greater return, just through the better location.

My point about farming was to ask why we can't all share in the fruits of rising productivity. Why can't we just keep doing what we had been doing, and still take advantage of fancy new gizmos? And the answer is that progress causes land values to rise, but the valuable land is generally owned by a subset of the populace who demand a greater and greater rent just because they can.

So really the question is: how can we all share the value of land, without it just funneling back to higher rents? My suggestion is to look at land value taxation.

Your suggestion would be wrong because your analysis is faulty. The land is useless without skilled people to operate it. What the skilled people have done is divide the labour which has created machines that farmers can use. The trouble is they can produce enough for themselves and their machine makers by the end of Tuesday. The challenge for the rest of us is to provide something of value to the farmer so they will work the rest of the week and create an exchange surplus.

Rentiers are just the current solution that forces farmers to work til Friday. The problem is that trickle down doesn't work.

Land value tax just makes everybody rentiers and racks off the farmers because they get nothing of exchange value in return for their week of labour.

Labor is the active force, and land is the passive force. Production cannot happen without both.

As for everyone being rentiers, I'm not sure I see the problem. Everyone being rentiers ensures a minimum standard of living, allowing us all to share in the progress of civilization. But really, land value taxation itself raises the "margin of production" even without any kind of redistribution.

The mention of trickle-down seems like a non sequitur.

Roughly none of that land is freely available.

It's also pretty clear that some sort of resource footprint is more interesting than apparent living density. Just food requires more than a few hundred square feet per person and we consume a lot more than food.

> Roughly none of that land is freely available.

You'll have to qualify that statement a little. Here is 5 acres of land in Texas for $1500 [1], found it in about 60 seconds.

[1] https://www.zillow.com/homes/for_sale/TX/land_type/209109538...

I actually said roughly, I didn't go back and edit that in or anything.

If you want to do brass tacks or whatever, buy it and scrape out a living to prove that cheap scrub desert makes a point about land being available.

What if automation and robotics made homesteading much easier, and more likely to succeed on land that was previously considered useless?

Obviously water and other resources are going to be an issue, but as a labour multiplier, AI and robotics have huge potential.

> What if automation and robotics made homesteading much easier, and more likely to succeed on land that was previously considered useless?

Then that land (if not already privately owned and actually available for homesteading) will be homesteaded, privatized, enter the land market, and not be rent-free land that is available. Just like the land that was attractive for homesteading in the past has been. Sure, its a one-time land-rush just like the initial homestead act, but after that the same forces of centralization of property that always work in a capitalist economy will work on it.

West of the 100th Meridian, water gets scarce. Land out here has value pretty much in proportion to how much water it has available, because you can't grow anything on it without water. And you can't fix lack of water by availability of robots.

Unfortunately, AI and robotics are only available to those with great capital and knowledge on how to apply those technologies; and I don't really see that changing any time soon.

And the cost of plumbing and electrifying that land would be astronomical. Public works have a network effect.

> Simply giving people money, irrespective of the financing method, as most advocates of the "technological unemployment" thesis argue for, ignores the nature of rent.

Its not giving people money, its redistributing it. The total amount of money chasing land rents won't change by the full amount redistributed, so the whole amount won't go into increased rents. Who can rent how much will change, and that's pretty much (in the reductionist view you advance where all purchase of economic output amounts to land rent) the point.

> Thing about land is they aren't making it anymore.

This is false. Humans have been making new land for a long time, and aren't about to stop:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_reclamation

Matter is neither created nor destroyed, and locations are the same.

If you did make an island off the coast of Manhattan, then you'd only be able to do so through the ownership rights of the location.

Titles are granted by the government, usually at a price, but sometimes as a handout to special interests. The US Federal Government leases the rights to deep sea oil rigs.

If you obtained such a handout to build an island off Manhattan, that would be a transfer from the commons into private hands... but not a net increase in locations.

You could easily take away the exact opposite conclusion from that. The source of funding for the money you are giving away should be 100% of all land rents.

>Thing about land is they aren't making it anymore.

SpaceX is going to change it.

If things worked out according to the rosiest predictions, that would raise what classical economists called the "margin of production" and would thus raise wages for as long as there is freely available land of sufficient quality. Although, you'd be surprised how quickly a commons can be enclosed.

Yet, given the harshness and distances in space, and the fact that land generally obtains value by proximity to other stores of human-produced value, I'm not as optimistic.

>Yet, given the harshness and distances in space, and the fact that land generally obtains value by proximity to other stores of human-produced value, I'm not as optimistic.

originally i did mean space, yet even the cheap globally available internet the Musk plans to build using SpaceX would noticeably increase availability of "connected" (an important aspect of "proximity") land.

> as long as there is freely available land of sufficient quality

For any reasonable near-term (centuries scale) prospect, there are no serious space or material constraints to outer space. Quality is a different subject, I want to get into that.

> Yet, given the harshness and distances in space, and the fact that land generally obtains value by proximity to other stores of human-produced value

Density of development is fundamentally different in microgravity. Our cities are all 2-dimensional. We can create a space station that hosts a "metro" area of stupendous population where everyone is in fairly quite commuting time of each other.

Of course, we have to return to the "quality" aspect. More work is required up-front to get this sort of thing working. On Earth, we already have many resources that we take for granted for which we would have to devote effort to producing in space. Consider, Oxygen, fresh water, soil, etc.

But couldn't the same thing have been said about virtually every component that went into creating the industrial revolution in the first place? The production of one thing requires support of another industrial product. Enormous production chains are created. Coal products are used in blast furnaces to make steel. Steel is used to make rail tracks to transport coal. Coal is burned to power steam engines to remove water from coal mines. Steal is used to produce those steam engines. Before long, steam engines are used to move coal over the tracks. All of this network goes to create manufactured goods, which make farming more efficient to support more people. In a superficial sense it would kind of sound easier to stay at prior population levels and live with the less efficient farming that didn't have this wild, confusing, and unsustainable web of dependencies.

Why haven't we made progress toward a space-based industrial network of production? You can hardly say we've tried. Through the Shuttle era, launch economics hardly budged. Space programs were turned into science & jobs programs. Manned exploration beyond Earth orbit stopped, and all robotic (indirect) interaction with the rest of material in our solar system ground to a crawl. A major rover like Curiosity takes years to drive as far as the manned lunar rover did in a day, at a tremendous time and resource cost.

Actual exploitation of space resources has so little actually invested in it. The main value we derive from space now is a perch from which to spy on and locate the citizens of Earth. Spending on space is not, at all, focused on something you can "development". Nor has it been. The one time we passed an international law on space resources (the Outer Space Treaty), we came up with incoherent and inaction-able drivel that undeveloped (and presently useless) resources were the property of everyone, and that only governments are really use them.

It hasn't been done because it's uneconomic with current technology.

Space mining is a nice idea with no practical road map. You can't just send tools into space, aim them at the nearest asteroid, and start drilling. You certainly can't expect to start building viable habitats yet.

The industrial revolution was incremental. A steam engine wasn't a completely new thing, it was just an improved source of power for existing technologies like spinning. Mechanisation could proceed gradually in a relatively comfortable environment with plenty of natural resources.

Not so in space. The problems - energy generation, mining, refining, distribution, assembly, sustainable life support and/or control (and probably defence) - have to be solved all at once, or you get nothing.

The steam engine was invented to remove water from coal mines, which was extracting coal to be used for heat. It was pretty darned new at that time, because the first versions operated by pulling a vacuum and experiments on strong partial vacuums had only just really begun not more than 100 years before then within English intellectual circles. It took quite some time and monumental efficient improvements after that for people to start employing coal-fired steam engines for tasks other than improving the production of coal itself.

You are exactly right that an entire network has to be solved together to open up space. This was also the case for the early industrial revolution. Because of this catch 22, right now we essentially have "space for space's sake".

That's also why space development will follow the pattern of a tipping point. As the pre-requisites aren't really there, investors don't have a good option to pour money into the venture. Once those building blocks start to get filled out, options open up, investment comes in, the building blocks themselves get cheaper, and things will progress faster than what people have imagined.

Humans have had, in total, a pitifully scant amount of interaction with extraterrestrial resources. Micro-gravity manufacturing isn't a thing yet, and we don't have the practical knowledge of how that will work. But the first step is lowering launch costs...