What exactly would happen in a, say, simplified agrarian model where people can homestead and own much land as they can work, but if they stop working it and hire employees to work it or rent it out then they lose it?
You’d have a slash-and-burn method of agriculture where your incentives are to extract the most from a particular piece of land in the short term, then abandon it and grab a new piece of land. Moloch smiles.
People have children, they can hold on to it forever as long as a descendant of theirs works it… if I assumed a no-child economy, I would have the same outcome.
My point is not that they can’t hold onto it, my point is that the incentives are to NOT hold—the incentives are to extract the short-term value even at the cost of long-term detriment. The situation is similar to the tragedy of the commons: grab what you can fast and some other schmuck can deal with the problems you left behind.
But why are the incentives so? If we know wildly assume everybody has children and they continue their profession, the only they cannot do is sell, rent out or hire people to work it. Are you basically saying something along the lines of short-termism is the default behavior (I would agree with that), and the possibility to exploit in the family long term is not strong enough incentive to counter-act, we also need the other incentives like possibility to sell, rent out or hire others to work it?
assume everybody has children and they continue their profession
That was kinda-sorta true for peasants in the XIII century, it is very very far away from true now. And if you’re talking about being unable to hire people, this is just plain silly, small plots of land cultivated mostly as a hobby (it’s very hard to support yourself at a reasonable standard of living from a plot of land that only you and your immediate family can work) are economically meaningless in a normal economy (as opposed to e.g. Soviet Russia).
You’d have a slash-and-burn method of agriculture where your incentives are to extract the most from a particular piece of land in the short term, then abandon it and grab a new piece of land. Moloch smiles.
People have children, they can hold on to it forever as long as a descendant of theirs works it… if I assumed a no-child economy, I would have the same outcome.
My point is not that they can’t hold onto it, my point is that the incentives are to NOT hold—the incentives are to extract the short-term value even at the cost of long-term detriment. The situation is similar to the tragedy of the commons: grab what you can fast and some other schmuck can deal with the problems you left behind.
But why are the incentives so? If we know wildly assume everybody has children and they continue their profession, the only they cannot do is sell, rent out or hire people to work it. Are you basically saying something along the lines of short-termism is the default behavior (I would agree with that), and the possibility to exploit in the family long term is not strong enough incentive to counter-act, we also need the other incentives like possibility to sell, rent out or hire others to work it?
That was kinda-sorta true for peasants in the XIII century, it is very very far away from true now. And if you’re talking about being unable to hire people, this is just plain silly, small plots of land cultivated mostly as a hobby (it’s very hard to support yourself at a reasonable standard of living from a plot of land that only you and your immediate family can work) are economically meaningless in a normal economy (as opposed to e.g. Soviet Russia).