Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments and Comments
- 1 The Adaptive, Evolutionary Theory of Divergent Economic Growth
- PART ONE GLOBAL TRENDS AND ADAPTIVE ECONOMICS
- PART TWO TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE IN AGRICULTURE AND INDUSTRY
- 4 The Economics of Technological Change and the Demise of the Sharecropper
- 5 Economic Development as an Adaptive Process
- 6 Industrial Development and Technological Change
- 7 An Adaptive Economizing Analysis of Chinese Enterprises Under Alternative Reform Regimes
- PART THREE EPOCHAL DEVELOPMENT
- PART FOUR TOWARD A GENERAL THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT
- Index
4 - The Economics of Technological Change and the Demise of the Sharecropper
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments and Comments
- 1 The Adaptive, Evolutionary Theory of Divergent Economic Growth
- PART ONE GLOBAL TRENDS AND ADAPTIVE ECONOMICS
- PART TWO TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE IN AGRICULTURE AND INDUSTRY
- 4 The Economics of Technological Change and the Demise of the Sharecropper
- 5 Economic Development as an Adaptive Process
- 6 Industrial Development and Technological Change
- 7 An Adaptive Economizing Analysis of Chinese Enterprises Under Alternative Reform Regimes
- PART THREE EPOCHAL DEVELOPMENT
- PART FOUR TOWARD A GENERAL THEORY OF DEVELOPMENT
- Index
Summary
Ten years ago, at the University of Oxford, a lecturer on political economy laid it down as axiomatic that science and invention, the division of labor, the law of diminishing returns, could do little to save human labor on the farm.
Ellis and Rumely, Power and the Plow (1911)The economic history of a region is determined by a complicated interaction among geological, biological, technological, social, and economic forces. A vivid portrayal of this process is found in the recent history of the rural American South; the resulting interplay of economic and social movements has been displayed there with irony and violence. Beginning gradually in the late 1930s, the adoption of labor-saving technology increased rapidly through the late 1940s and early 1950s. In some cases, the diffusion of a new technique grew by more than 100 percent per annum. Greatly lowered physical labor coefficients of new techniques created relatively profitable investment opportunities by substituting capital-intensive, low-variable-cost methods for labor-intensive, high-variable-cost methods of production. A similar process was also at work in other parts of the United States. From 1940 to 1960, the index of man-hours of farm work dropped from 191 to 92 for the United States as a whole and in the Delta States of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi from 247 to 93.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Divergent Dynamics of Economic GrowthStudies in Adaptive Economizing, Technological Change, and Economic Development, pp. 59 - 78Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003