Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 April 2015
Virtually every economic situation in agriculture has an unmatched pair of implications that may be called the proximate and the ultimate. Devaluation of the fixed assets of agriculture has a meaning of enormous significance in the here-and-now — the proximate. It bears not so much on impersonal gross measures of productivity and output but on the human element. Loss of farm asset values is a major blow to the hopes and aspirations of hundreds of thousands of farmers, bringing intense emotional distress and even suicides.