Promoting small-scale farming and industry lead to widespread poverty and famine in cultural revolution China.
> very few people work in farming, the smallest amount in history. Why can't it slide back the other way?
It could, but this would probably be a pretty bad thing. I guess it depends how many people who currently have fake bullshit jobs transition to being farm workers. My guess is that almost everyone who would go into an expanded ag labor base is currently doing some actually useful work, and we would suffer a severe net decrease in labor output, if we tanked farming efficiency.
In this specific example, there might have been other causes.
In general I agree with you, getting the entire US to "go Amish" isn't viable. Just picking on your example which leaves out some of the details about how the transition was "promoted".
So I read this book called "How Asia Works" which documented the economic transformations of a few different Asian countries.
I was shocked to learn that in a lot of cases, the industrial farming not the huge boon that was expected efficiently a few people can grow things with intensely you can plant small plot farms.
Countries that promoted small-scale household farming instead of moving too soon to large scale farming were more successful, but this was largely because the labor pool can't transition that fast to going from farmers being everyone one in ten overnight.
We live at a time where very few people work in farming, the smallest amount in history. Why can't it slide back the other way?