Cheap food causes cooperative ethics
Nobody has ever fought a war over the oxygen in the air because there’s plenty of oxygen to go around. We fight over things that are scarce and valuable. Historically, most wars have been fought over land and people. If you win you get to force your subjects to collect raw materials from the land. Sometimes these raw materials are mineral resources. Historically, most slaves have been forced to cultivate food.
It’s hard to comprehend how important food staples used to be. In Edo Japan, wealth was measured in koku (石). One koku is (in theory) enough rice to feed one man for one year. The amount of koku a daimyo controlled was basically how many people he owned because a region’s food staple production determined its carrying capacity and the human population grew until it hit carrying capacity. In other words, we bred until we were on the edge of starving to death. Most wars have ultimately been fought over land because land determines food production and food production was a matter of life and death.
My grandfather, who grew up in Taiwan before the green revolution, was too poor to afford rice. He ate sweet potatoes instead.
The green revolution of the 1950s and the 1960s increased food production faster than our population growth. On the Chinese version of TikTok[1] there’s a video of a guy eating a bowl of white rice with a spoonful of soy sauce. The comments are all of people feeling sorry for him. We have so much food these days that eating nothing but rice makes you surprisingly poor even by Chinese standards.
World War II ended in 1945—right before the green revolution. There has been no direct war between major world powers between then and now. I don’t think this is a coincidence. Wars are usually about land and land is usually about food production and food production skyrocketed in the decades after World War II. (Birth control became widely adopted around the same time too.)
We still have small wars. We fight over oil and ideologies. But cars and capitalism aren’t as important as food production. Fighting wars over food is stupid when food is cheap. Less fighting over food means less fighting overall. Countries being at peace with each other set the conditions for us to build more complex, interdependent trade networks. I think the idea that we’re all human beings, regardless of our race, religion, sex and country of origin gained increasing power because cooperation is a winning strategy when there is enough to go around.
I predict that if per capita food production returns to the levels of 1914 1776[2] then so will humankind’s ethics.
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In 1821, Japan was a feudal isolationist polity.
In 1921, Japan was an industrial Western-style empire.
In 2021, Japan is a post-industrial, democratic, liberalish nation-state.
What got Japan to break out of its isolation? The United States threatened to burn down its capitol.
What got Japan to abandon its empire? The United States actually did burn down its capitol. B-29s dropped firebombs on defenseless cities full of women, children and the elderly. 100,000 civilians were killed in Tokyo alone.
This isn’t a criticism of the United States. Between Nazi Germany, the Japanese Empire, the Soviet Union and the United States, the United States was the closest thing there was to “the good guys”.
least evil≠good
My great grandfather served on the US Merchant Marine. His job was to operate ships carrying weapons and equipment from the United States to Europe while dodging U-boats. After Germany surrendered, he wanted to drop punitive atomic bombs on German cities.
I understand his perspective. He was a Jew.
The Advance of Modern Civilization
Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres claims that the advance of science reduced hatred. We had science in 1945. But did we really have less hatred then in, say, 1845?
Yes. Yes we did. Slavery was legal in the United States in 1845. It ended because the industrial capacity of the Union crushed the plantation-based economy of the Confederacy. Just like the industrial capacity of the United States and manpower of the Soviet Union crushed their enemies in World War II.
Are you noticing the pattern yet? Modern industrial societies produce so much of everything they outcompete slave-based societies[1] based around raw materials.
Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres believes hatred decreased because Enlightenment ideals encouraged us to change our minds. I claim hatred decreased because the material bounty of technological advancement increased the competitive advantage of cooperation compared to violence.
Is there a way to test this? To do so we’d need to examine a nation where Enlightenment ideals came before industrialization or a nation where industrialization came before Enlightenment ideals. History provides us with both.
Meiji Japan industrialized without subscribing to Enlightenment ideals.
The United States was founded with Enlightenment ideals before it industrialized.
What happened?
The United States exterminated the Native Americans. The United States’ universalist ideals took hold after it industrialized, not before. It had people in concentration camps all the way up to 1945.
Meiji Japan comitted atrocity after atrocity even after it industrialized, all the way up to 1945.
Meiji Japan abolished the samurai class.
The United States abolished slavery (eventually).
The ultimate strategic objectives for Japan’s and the United States’ East Asian conquests were identical. They both wanted buffer states against the Soviet Union and access to raw materials. If Japan and the United States had such similar interests then why did the United States build up its conquests while Japan enslaved them? Japan did industrialize Korea and Manchuria. The United States did a better job because it had 5× the industrial capacity of the Japanese Empire at the Japanese Empire’s peak. The United States had so much wheat it shipped the surplus to starving occupied Japan for free. Japanese cuisine is dominated by rice. The United States shipped so much wheat to Japan it basically created a national dish. Ramen noodles are popular in Japan today because they needed a way to eat all that wheat.
It’s hard to hate other people for hogging all the wheat when there is too much wheat to go around. We have so much corn we ferment it into ethanol so we can burn it[2].
Subjugating other people requires coordination. The more of value we produce, the less it’s worthwhile to spend that coordination extracting tiny bits of material value from other people. It you want to bring hatred to modern lows and equality to modern highs, it’s not enough just to industrialize a little. You have to industrialize a nation so much its people can’t be bothered to oppress others because they have better things to do with their time. Hatred has decreased because we live in the golden age of all golden ages.
This post is focused on conflicts between civilizations. I’m ignoring hunter-gatherers and pastoralists.
Technically, there is an even stronger causation in the opposite direction: we grow so much corn because we can burn it. The economics of biofuels are beyond the scope of this comment.
I thought what broke Japan was a credible threat of being nuked rather than the firebombings
Worth noting that Northern states abolished slavery long before industrialization. Perhaps even more striking, the British Empire (mostly) abolished slavery during the peak of its profitability. In both cases (and many others across the world), moral arguments seem to have played a very large role.
The historian Bret Devereaux argues that most wars were indeed fought over land, but that fighting over land had already became unprofitable by World War 1, and wars kept happening anyway because people’s intuitions and institutions had not caught up:
This is a good point. My year of 1914 was too late. I failed to account for cultural inertia. I have changed the year to 1776.
This is deeply unconvincing. We didn’t have a great power war in the 60s or the 70s because that would have meant nuclear war. High-level US government officials in internal documents describe Russia as an existential threat. Russian government documents, as I understand it, reflect terror of American willingness to use nukes. We haven’t had a war between the US and China yet, but estimates of that holding true over the next five years are less confident than I’d like.
“Most wars have ultimately been fought over land because land determines food production and food production was a matter of life and death.”
It seems like you’re explaining the actions of kings with the preferences of peasants (and I am very unconvinced that a victorious war was better for the average peasant than peace), and I don’t see that as particularly persuasive.
Starving peasants revolt. Kings don’t like revolts. Using starving peasants as soldiers to conquer new land is a way to divert peasant revolt by promising them the new land. And the king kills 2 birds with 1 stone, since starving peasants die killing neighbouring rivals. I’m not certain that’s how it happens, but it’s plausible and it solves all your qualms.
Is this true? My understanding is that it’s typically the well educated middle classes that start revolutions. Starving peasants are not well positioned to organized much less win, revolutions.
I’m not an expert, but assuming that by revolution you mean something close to “an attempt to change government through non-legal means”, then I agree with your points, but I’ll also note that revolt and revolution only partially overlap. Revolts are typically less organised and with more modest goals than a government overthrow. They are also mostly initiated and fueled by the resentment and desperation of a lower class.
My tentative model is “Starving peasants revolt. Kings don’t like revolts.” Not “Starving peasants lead successful revolutions.”
To take a modern day example that I have experience with, the yellow vest movement in France was a revolt from the working poor outside big cities because the rise in the gas price made their life impossible in a context where they needed cars to work and purchase essential goods. They were leaderless and actually opposed attempts at vertical organisation. In their early stages, they would have been content with gas prices returning to their previous levels. Nonetheless, they were a thorn in the side of the government, and were even a threat to it at some point.
Three years later, I mostly stand by this: war with China has not happened, but estimates of likelihoods have risen, and it not driven by food concerns in the slightest.
This seems probably right.
I’m interested in the obvious followup questions of “how hard does this check out over more than 2 examples? How strong is the effect size of surplus food / how much food do you need? Do you need enlightenment memes separately from the food? Is food abundance sufficient or do you also need other kinds of abundance?”
Republican Rome is the example I know best, and...it sorta fits?
Rome fought a lot of wars, and they were usually pretty extractive: sometimes total wars in which the entire losing side was killed or enslaved, other times wars of conquest in which the losing states were basically left intact but made to give tribute (usually money and/or soldiers for the legions). They definitely relied on captured foreigners to work their farms, especially in Sicily where it was hard to escape, and they got so rich from tribute that they eliminated most taxes on citizens in the 160s BC.
It’s not clear that Rome was short of food and slaves when it started those wars, though. If anything, they sometimes had the opposite problem: around 50 BC so many farmers and farmers’ sons were being recruited into the legions that Italian farmland wasn’t being used well. I think the popular consensus is that a lot of warfare and especially enslavement was a principal-agent issue: Roman generals were required by custom to split any captured booty with their soldiers, but were allowed to keep all the profits from slave-trading for themselves. Enslaving a tribe of defeated Gauls was a great way to get rich, and you needed to be rich to advance in Roman politics.
To summarize, Roman warfare during the republic was definitely essential to Roman food security, but they got into a lot more wars than you’d predict from that factor alone.
Clear exceptions to the rule include the Social war (basically an Italian civil war), the third Punic war (eliminating the existential threat of Carthage), and some of Caesar’s post-dictatorship adventures (civil war again).
Keep in mind—oil is food production, as much or more than land is. Moving workers to the right spots, running irrigation pumps, machinery, etc. is all fueled by oil. As is moving raw food to processing areas, and then to the actual hungry people.
In-group ethics don’t have to be the same as between-group ethics. For most of history they weren’t. Universal ethics is a new and WEIRD idea. If a society exists in a state of plenty, its members can behave in a nice, genteel manner to each other, even if they are viciously exploiting other societies to maintain their lifestyle.
Although I agree with the overarching point, I don’t think this particular line of argument holds up. For instance, the invention of the Haber-Bosch process did nothing to stop the two bloodiest wars in human history from occurring almost immediately afterwards.
War happens when there’s not enough food to feed the people in a nation. Another way of saying it would be that war happens where there’s too many people in a nation to feed. Most individuals value breeding as a noble goal, and that’s respectable. But nations encourage breeding because of competitive reasons: to have expandable soldiers for war (military compatition), to increase production of goods (trade/cultural competition), to support modernization (technological competition). New humans are like missiles. I predict human population will not stabilize by themselves. 1 of 3 things will happen:
human population will grow over 10 billions
there will be human non-proliferation treaties the like of nuclear weapon non-proliferation treaties (prefered but unlikely)
large, bad losses of already existing life (war, crime, famine, disease)
UK will be testing this theory shortly.