Work Ethic - wheat vs rice

[lpm]

On another thread, "rootless materialism", individualism and reduction in Christian belief were mentioned as possible factors in personal success and the lack of it, with the east vs west work ethic being mentioned. I think it was Malcolm Gladwell who publicised the wheat vs rice theory a few years back, and no-one likes him and I'm not sure if it's still considered valid, but it's interesting.

Idea is that growing wheat in Europe and northern China involves a lot of chance. You work hard ploughing and sowing, but the size of the harvest is significantly influenced by the exact weather across the growing season. You can be pretty idle and get a lucky harvest, or work like a slave and see your crop wiped out.

Meanwhile, growing rice in southern China and East Asia is much more correlated with hard work put in. The paddy fields must be maintained, kept perfectly level, planted and weeded, irrigated perfectly, painstakingly harvested. Overall the required labour is about double that of wheat, but an hour's extra work is highly likely to result in extra grains harvested.

Then there are herders, often on the move with not much to do - but at constant risk of their livestock being stolen or attacked by wolves. Violent response is necessary and so courage and strength are valued, with a lot of blood feuding with rival herders.

These differences then feed through into the religions created by people in these regions. Wheat growers invent capricious deities, given to harsh punishments for random misdemeanors and rewards for loyalty to the deity not work. Rice growers invent supernatural ways in which goodness and dedication are rewarded. Herders like violent deities who do a lot of smiting and feuding.

Another add-on to the theory is that rice growers are more cooperative, because the complex irrigation systems need combined decisions and labour, with individualism being disastrous.

The theory is also that these traits persist across subsequent generations, even if people have migrated to another country - i.e. Asian-Americans retain their work ethic and cooperative behaviour even if they've been in wheat growing areas for generations and are wealthy families who've never been on a farm in their lives. Divorce rates remain lower, individualism is less respected.

In this theory, we couldn't expect individualistic British people to suddenly improve their work ethic to match Asian immigrants, or expect "Christian" values to get us away from materialism. Ironically, British people are more likely to be what some perceive as dole scroungers than global immigrants.

[Bird on a Fire]

As I recall, another part of the difference Gladwell highlighted was how feudalism was structured.

In European feudalism no matter how much you grew almost all of it went to whichever lord owned your land. In the Chinese system rents were fixed, with farmers allowed to keep all the surplus.

So under the Chinese system one is better motivated to maximise productivity as you're able to keep the fruits of your labour, rather than giving it all to some oligarch you were born indebted to.

I do quite like Gladwell's books but accept that the narratives likely contain enormous oversimplifications in the service of making a point persuasively.

I don't know enough about history or agronomy to assess the veracity of what I've posted, but mention it for completeness/interest.

[plodder]

This is hugely fun, thanks.

I'll add that the decision to grow wheat or rice or herd animals also depends on geology / topography, so there's a thing there too.

I'm surprised the last Labour manifesto didn't include a Maoist call for the unemployed to be drawn into an army to create some mountains in East Anglia in order to improve the national spirit.

[dyqik]

Of course, any discussion in this thread will happen as a result of people goofing off of work, which may flavor it some.

[noggins]

Well since its Gladwell, the null hypothesis is its bollocks.

My alternative is that Chinese military geography is favourable to a strong central government quickly crushing dissent.

Also why are the Chinese so mad for gambling then?

[bmforre]

Of course, any discussion in this thread will happen as a result of people goofing off of work, which may flavor it some.

Of course if they were working on an old-style assembly line performing repetitive tasks in a chain this could be bad work ethics.
Now that utterly repetitive tasks have largely been automated some are making Very Big Business out of making divertissements.

Dealing with the chainwork as well as the divertissement in a constructive and productive process will be necessary going forward.

[lpm]

Well since its Gladwell, the null hypothesis is its bollocks.

I don't think it's Gladwell's idea, merely that his books made the idea more widely known.

[shpalman]

This is interesting. There's a lot of rice grown in the north of Italy...

[Bird on a Fire]

The relevant chapter is the eighth, "Rice Paddies and Math Tests" from Outliers. Quoting a few other details of the argument, for interest:

Historically, Western agriculture is "mechanically" oriented. In the West, if a farmer wanted to become more efficient or increase his yield, he introduced more and more sophisticated equipment, which allowed him to replace human labor with mechanical labor: a threshing machine, a hay baler, a combine harvester, a tractor. He cleared another field and increased his acreage, because now his machinery allowed him to work more land with the same amount of effort. But in Japan or China, farmers didn't have the money to buy equipment—and, in any case, there certainly wasn't any extra land that could easily be converted into new fields. So rice farmers improved their yields by becoming smarter, by being better managers of their own time, and by making better choices. As the anthropologist Francesca Bray puts it, rice agriculture is "skill oriented": if you're willing to weed a bit more diligently, and become more adept at fertilizing, and spend a bit more time monitoring water levels, and do a better job keeping the claypan absolutely level, and make use of every square inch of your rice paddy, you'll harvest a bigger crop. Throughout history, not surprisingly, the people who grow rice have always worked harder than almost any other kind of farmer.

What redeemed the life of a rice farmer, however, was the nature of that work. It was a lot like the garment work done by the Jewish immigrants to New York. It was meaningful. First of all, there is a clear relationship in rice farming between effort and reward. The harder you work a rice field, the more it yields. Second, it's complex work. The rice farmer isn't simply planting in the spring and harvesting in the fall. He or she effectively runs a small business, juggling a family workforce, hedging uncertainty through seed selection, building and managing a sophisticated irrigation system, and coordinating the complicated process of harvesting the first crop while simultaneously preparing the second crop.

And, most of all, it's autonomous. The peasants of Europe worked essentially as low-paid slaves of an aristocratic landlord, with little control over their own destinies. But China and Japan never developed that kind of oppressive feudal system, because feudalism simply can't work in a rice economy. Growing rice is too complicated and intricate for a system that requires farmers to be coerced and bullied into going out into the fields each morning. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, landlords in central and Southern China had an almost completely hands-off relationship with their tenants: they would collect a fixed rent and let farmers go about their business.

"The thing about wet-rice farming is, not only do you need phenomenal amounts of labor, but it's very exacting," says the historian Kenneth Pomerantz. "You have to care. It really matters that the field is perfectly leveled before you flood it. Getting it close to level but not quite right makes a big difference in terms of your yield. It really matters that the water is in the fields for just the right amount of time. There's a big difference between lining up the seedlings at exactly the right distance and doing it sloppily. It's not like you put the corn in the ground in mid-March and as long as rain comes by the end of the month, you're okay. You're controlling all the inputs in a very direct way. And when you have something that requires that much care, the overlord has to have a system that gives the actual laborer some set of incentives, where if the harvest comes out well, the farmer gets a bigger share. That's why you get fixed rents, where the landlord says, I get twenty bushels, regardless of the harvest, and if it's really good, you get the extra. It's a crop that doesn't do very well with something like slavery or wage labor. It would just be too easy to leave the gate that controls the irrigation water open a few seconds too long and there goes your field."

The following is given in the Notes section, by way of sources:

To read more on the history and intricacies of rice cultivation, see Francesca Bray's The Rice Economies: Technology and Development in Asian Societies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994).

[dyqik]

This is interesting. There's a lot of rice grown in the north of Italy...

Lots of rice grown in the US as well.

This seems to go as far back as late 1600s.

[Bird on a Fire]

This is interesting. There's a lot of rice grown in the north of Italy...

Yes, there's a lot around my part of Portugal too. I spend a lot of time birdwatching there in the spring when the paddies are immensely important habitat for waterbirds returning from Africa, but I also make sure to buy rice from the local producers. We even have a nice arborio equivalent, carolino, which does a serviceable risotto.

I don't know much about the history of production here, other than that for a long time it was a luxury rather than a staple, as in much of Asia historically and now coastal Africa too. I am planning to do a bit of reading up on this, though.

[dyqik]

This is interesting. There's a lot of rice grown in the north of Italy...

Yes, there's a lot around my part of Portugal too. I spend a lot of time birdwatching there in the spring when the paddies are immensely important habitat for waterbirds returning from Africa, but I also make sure to buy rice from the local producers. We even have a nice arborio equivalent, carolino, which does a serviceable risotto.

I don't know much about the history of production here, other than that for a long time it was a luxury rather than a staple, as in much of Asia historically and now coastal Africa too. I am planning to do a bit of reading up on this, though.

In the US, for a good while it was often slave food, grown by slaves. The wiki article on rice production in the US covers the history pretty well - more extensively than the current situation of rice production, I think.

From the wiki article, I get the impression that rice production arrived in the US more from Africa than from Asia during the slave trade years, with later Asian immigrants bringing it to the west coast around 1900.

[plodder]

The relevant chapter is the eighth, "Rice Paddies and Math Tests" from Outliers. Quoting a few other details of the argument, for interest:

Historically, Western agriculture is "mechanically" oriented. In the West, if a farmer wanted to become more efficient or increase his yield, he introduced more and more sophisticated equipment, which allowed him to replace human labor with mechanical labor: a threshing machine, a hay baler, a combine harvester, a tractor. He cleared another field and increased his acreage, because now his machinery allowed him to work more land with the same amount of effort. But in Japan or China, farmers didn't have the money to buy equipment—and, in any case, there certainly wasn't any extra land that could easily be converted into new fields. So rice farmers improved their yields by becoming smarter, by being better managers of their own time, and by making better choices. As the anthropologist Francesca Bray puts it, rice agriculture is "skill oriented": if you're willing to weed a bit more diligently, and become more adept at fertilizing, and spend a bit more time monitoring water levels, and do a better job keeping the claypan absolutely level, and make use of every square inch of your rice paddy, you'll harvest a bigger crop. Throughout history, not surprisingly, the people who grow rice have always worked harder than almost any other kind of farmer.

my bold. why? They're working harder, the returns are more reliable, they don't pay tithes so they keep more profit, so why aren't they wealthier? Is this where the argument falls down?

[lpm]

Was there much rice equipment anyway? Presumably there must be now, but was it all basically all by hand until modern equipment?

Population density ends up being higher, so crop per person might not necessarily be higher. Start with a large acreage, be very effective, and within a few decades you end up with loads of great-grandchildren each with tiny amounts of land.

[Bird on a Fire]

Was there much rice equipment anyway? Presumably there must be now, but was it all basically all by hand until modern equipment?

In terms of mechanical equipment, it certainly can be mechanised (the fields around here are maintained with diggers and tractors), though possibly with lower yield per area (but more per person-hour, and conveniently ignoring the carbon externalities like flooding loads of low-lying rice-producing areas).

But the industrial revolution started in western Europe. In China the rural population was overwhelmingly in poverty until long after the revolution, and Japan didn't start to industrialise until the post-war period, as far as I recall.

I'd probably liken rice growing to the gig economy - more work means more money, but it's always a pittance. The work is probably more interesting than cycling around with hamburgers, though.

[dyqik]

Was there much rice equipment anyway? Presumably there must be now, but was it all basically all by hand until modern equipment?

The wiki article on US rice production mentions draft animal pulled plows and harvest wains being used in the 1700s in the US.

[bmforre]

The relevant chapter is the eighth, "Rice Paddies and Math Tests" from Outliers. Quoting a few other details of the argument, for interest:

... rice farmers improved their yields by becoming smarter, by being better managers of their own time, and by making better choices. As the anthropologist Francesca Bray puts it, rice agriculture is "skill oriented": if you're willing to weed a bit more diligently, and become more adept at fertilizing, and spend a bit more time monitoring water levels, and do a better job keeping the claypan absolutely level, and make use of every square inch of your rice paddy, you'll harvest a bigger crop. Throughout history, not surprisingly, the people who grow rice have always worked harder than almost any other kind of farmer.

What redeemed the life of a rice farmer, however, was the nature of that work. It was a lot like the garment work done by the Jewish immigrants to New York. It was meaningful. First of all, there is a clear relationship in rice farming between effort and reward. The harder you work a rice field, the more it yields. Second, it's complex work. The rice farmer isn't simply planting in the spring and harvesting in the fall. He or she effectively runs a small business, juggling a family workforce, hedging uncertainty through seed selection, building and managing a sophisticated irrigation system, and coordinating the complicated process of harvesting the first crop while simultaneously preparing the second crop.

And, most of all, it's autonomous. The peasants of Europe worked essentially as low-paid slaves of an aristocratic landlord, with little control over their own destinies. But China and Japan never developed that kind of oppressive feudal system, because feudalism simply can't work in a rice economy. Growing rice is too complicated and intricate for a system that requires farmers to be coerced and bullied into going out into the fields each morning. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, landlords in central and Southern China had an almost completely hands-off relationship with their tenants: they would collect a fixed rent and let farmers go about their business.

I have been reading "Red Famine, Stalin's War on Ukraine" by Anne Applebaum. Even though Ukraine grow wheat rather than rice the work ethic demanded in agriculture was so far from Stalinist ideas that this rich agricultural area was driven into famine and petit bourgeois farmers, branded as "kulak"s, were blamed and sent to Siberia etc.

[noggins]

Its a sort of Whig-history gone Orient, innit?

I think cultures have shallow roots and deep causes are post hoc blather.

[lpm]

Thank you for sharing what you think.

[noggins]

Thank you too

[Woodchopper]

The relevant chapter is the eighth, "Rice Paddies and Math Tests" from Outliers. Quoting a few other details of the argument, for interest:

Historically, Western agriculture is "mechanically" oriented. In the West, if a farmer wanted to become more efficient or increase his yield, he introduced more and more sophisticated equipment, which allowed him to replace human labor with mechanical labor: a threshing machine, a hay baler, a combine harvester, a tractor. He cleared another field and increased his acreage, because now his machinery allowed him to work more land with the same amount of effort. But in Japan or China, farmers didn't have the money to buy equipment—and, in any case, there certainly wasn't any extra land that could easily be converted into new fields. So rice farmers improved their yields by becoming smarter, by being better managers of their own time, and by making better choices. As the anthropologist Francesca Bray puts it, rice agriculture is "skill oriented": if you're willing to weed a bit more diligently, and become more adept at fertilizing, and spend a bit more time monitoring water levels, and do a better job keeping the claypan absolutely level, and make use of every square inch of your rice paddy, you'll harvest a bigger crop. Throughout history, not surprisingly, the people who grow rice have always worked harder than almost any other kind of farmer.

my bold. why? They're working harder, the returns are more reliable, they don't pay tithes so they keep more profit, so why aren't they wealthier? Is this where the argument falls down?

As mentioned by others, they were wealthier, for thousands of years. However, China didn't industrialize nearly as fast as Europe in the 18th Century, and then in the 19th and early 20th Century it was wracked by very destructive civil conflict while imperial powers took control over the most profitable bits.

[sheldrake]

These differences then feed through into the religions created by people in these regions. Wheat growers invent capricious deities, given to harsh punishments for random misdemeanors and rewards for loyalty to the deity not work. Rice growers invent supernatural ways in which goodness and dedication are rewarded. Herders like violent deities who do a lot of smiting and feuding.

I'm not clear which religions he's classified as coming from 'Wheat growers', 'Rice Growers' and 'Herders'. Manchurians were fairly warlike horsemen but their religion was Tibetan buddhism. The ancient Gaels mixed oat & barley agriculture with herding etc.. Hinduism is practiced by people who eat rice as well as wheat, and it's extremely broad, perhaps a category/family of religions rather than 1 religion...

[plodder]

There are multiple religions / philosophies in e.g. China etc as well, which developed at different times. Which time are we talking about (and why aren't we talking about the others)?

[JQH]

Of course, any discussion in this thread will happen as a result of people goofing off of work, which may flavor it some.

Some of us no longer work.

[Bird on a Fire]

These differences then feed through into the religions created by people in these regions. Wheat growers invent capricious deities, given to harsh punishments for random misdemeanors and rewards for loyalty to the deity not work. Rice growers invent supernatural ways in which goodness and dedication are rewarded. Herders like violent deities who do a lot of smiting and feuding.

I'm not clear which religions he's classified as coming from 'Wheat growers', 'Rice Growers' and 'Herders'. Manchurians were fairly warlike horsemen but their religion was Tibetan buddhism. The ancient Gaels mixed oat & barley agriculture with herding etc.. Hinduism is practiced by people who eat rice as well as wheat, and it's extremely broad, perhaps a category/family of religions rather than 1 religion...

From what I recall and the skim-reading I performed earlier today, the argument isn't concerned with religions or formal philosophies at all, but at a rather more basic level what we could call a work ethic, or philosphy, or modus operandi, or something like that. A sort of general cultural attitude - left deliberately vague.

The book in question is about why some people become exceptional, looking for both individual and societal traits that lead to success. It's quite lightweight, but thus a quick read, and stimulating in a folksy kind of way. You might enjoy it (I did).

There are multiple religions / philosophies in e.g. China etc as well, which developed at different times. Which time are we talking about (and why aren't we talking about the others)?

I think we're talking more about underlying threads of similarity between the various 'eastern' vs 'western' philosophies and religions (I don't think it's particularly controversial to state that these regional differences in traditions do exist).