The curse of the potato | Hacker News Reader

The curse of the potato

washingtonpost.com

92 pointsmiiiiiike43 comments

I'm not convinced by "complex hierarchies and taxation schemes". It sounds just as plausible that grain was one of the first really tradeable forms of food, so people became able to trade non-food-related skills for food, with people from further away. Your ability to do this is badly limited if you're using wet foods like potatoes, because you are only able to trade with people fairly nearby before the potatoes start sprouting; but with grain you can send your son off to the market three hours' wagon-ride away with a month's worth of crop, for instance.

Isn't that the point behind the article? That the kind of foods that you produce has a bearing on the progress of the society itself.

You're thinking on too small a scale. One of the most important commercial activities in the Roman Empire was the importation of grain from across the Mediterranean (especially from Egypt) to the capital.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cura_Annonae

By the early 18th century, Japan had developed full-on derivatives markets (not just futures but CDS-style bets) for its rice crops.

I like the "portability/storability" hypothesis this article is proposing for societal development. If only because it becomes a proxy for financial systems. And you don't have to "convince" people that your money is useful: You can always eat it!

> Japan had developed full-on derivatives markets (not just futures but CDS-style bets) for its rice crops.

Any English-written resources for that? It sounds really interesting.

Check out Wikipedia on the Dōjima Rice Exchange and the references therein.

Was trying to find the section in a textbook I had read about this, but this article[0] on the Dojima Market goes into a good amount of detail about this, and is a fun read.

[0]: http://disciplinas.stoa.usp.br/pluginfile.php/69204/mod_reso...

> Recognizing the potential profit opportunity, the Nagoya merchant bought the future harvest of his region by paying approximately 10% to the farmers and writing drafts for the rest of the negotiated amount. These drafts were not to be presented for payment before the rice was actually sold. When the harvest came in, he stored it and after three or four months sold it with a profit of 30- 40%, as prices had climbed in the meantime.2

It is interesting that this sort of financial instrument would have been totally impossible with water logged veggies.

Showing Ireland as being dependent on roots and tubers in pre-colonial times is just plain wrong. It was the colonisers who brought the potato to Ireland.

This makes me suspect that the data is being made to fit the theory here and that they didn't want to leave out Ireland because, well, people would expect it to be there in any article about the impact of the potato :)

Turnips and beets are roots too.

Do we have good information on what the crop distributions were in Ireland prior to 1492 (I assume that's how they define "pre-colonial") ? I wonder how this could really be determined anywhere. I wouldn't think there would be enough archaeological evidence to determine this with much accuracy and it seems unlikely written records from that period would have given sufficient detail either.

They actually have a pretty good idea of what they ate. Interesting article on it here:

http://www.ravensgard.org/prdunham/irishfood.html

The TLDR of their diet is "mostly pottage and soups, heavy on meat and dairy. Some oats and barley were grown, but a lot of that ended up being made into alcoholic beverages."

Alcoholic beverages have the advantage of making contaminated water drinkable without losing much in the way of calories in the original grain. A really clever solution to a problem of how to avoid dysentery when your water supply is not safe to drink.

Ireland's myths and legends all revolve around cattle, and cattle - milk, specifically - was the primary source of food before potatoes, along with some grain and vegetables:

http://www.bonappetit.com/trends/article/what-the-irish-ate-...

Great article, I'm a little skeptical about the sourcing though. Most of the information seems to come from general literature (as opposed to something more objective, like say taxation records). What people choose to write about isn't necessarily what's most common in practice. For example a visitor from France would probably be more likely to write about some strange kind of cheese he's never seen before than the bread that looks more or less similar to what he's been eating everyday.

I don't doubt the importance of dairy but I doubt it accounted for the majority of people's calorie intake.

Agreed, fascinating thesis but these types of big picture analysis are always as weak as their least reliable source of data. And as others have pointed out, labeling "pre colonial" Ireland as reliant on tubers makes me question their sources. I have the same problem with Pinker's "Better Angels of Our Nature" which seems hugely convincing until you check the footnotes and realize he's relying substantially on historical data from a single out of date and non peer reviewed source.

And why is most of Europe except Ireland and Spain left out of the maps ? That alone suggests they could be cherry-picking the data.

What about China? Most of it looks like "large chiefdoms".

This article uses such a broad definition of pre-colonial times. When exactly is that? I don't believe India was almost empty around 1400 AD. Quite contrary, given that there were already well established empires at that time.

Not hardly, by that time, Muslim invaders were half-way through 4 centuries of slaughtering 100 million Hindus (and I'm sure Sikh and Janes), and were hardly depopulating the land. And, yeah, there was a lot of history of empires and such before the start of this in the 13th Century.

I loved the starting premise that it was so much better to develop large, hierarchical, societies.

Better for whom?

Better for surviving contact with other societies, sure.

Better for quality of life for the average person? Probably not so much.

When speaking in terms of populations, "better" is generally used in terms of outcome, i.e. the sense of "increasing odds of survival". Quality of life and survivability tend to align, but in the cases where they don't, evolution will obviously tend to select for the latter.

I think part of the overarching problem is that there's a tendency by some to frame the move from hunter-gatherer to agriculture as some sort of choice, when really the move has been pretty solidly dictated by circumstance. Expanding population drove the development of farming and became a feedback loop with it. The only way to "choose" to remain a hunter-gatherer society would be to either forbid farming, or to impose an artificial limit on population, neither of which are really possible in a decentralized tribal society.

>Better for quality of life for the average person? Probably not so much.

Sure, if you don't think medicine, technology, or literacy contribute to quality of life. All evidence suggests that, back then at least, large, organized social structures were very important for developing technology.

Even if technological progress was slowed, leading to a worse average quality of life compared to more advanced societies, wouldn't the lag be worthwhile if the society was more egalitarian by the time progress did happen?

No. I don't care if your and my kids both starve equally.

Here's a hypothetical model of two societies:

1. Everybody starves equally for many years until technology progresses to the point where no one has to starve. The quality of food is a small percentage better each year.

2. Everybody starves in the beginning, and after every few years some small x℅ of people don't have to starve anymore.

Depending on the specifics of the numbers, it is possible that is you had to be born in one of the societies at a random time in their existence, you would choose the former. I don't see how it is possible to dismiss the former as worse than the latter for the average person without any more evidence.

Egalitarian? That just means equal protection under the law. I' guessing you mean something akin to everyone ending up with the same size basket of goodies at the end of each round of the game...

Of the societies we humans apparently know how to create... We know how to create societies with equal misery. We have from time-to-time been able to construct unequal societies with growing wealth, where everyone did better than their parents, over time -- and than those in many societies around them and in history.

What we have never been able to construct is a society where everyone is equal and wealthy and getting more-so. This may or may not be possible with human beings. One thing is certain -- we're not bees.

While poverty is a real tragedy and a real grind, a harm to people that should be mitigated, it's not clear that the fact that someone somewhere might be richer than me is any sort of tragedy whatsoever that needs to be addressed.

> What we have never been able to construct is a society where everyone is equal and wealthy and getting more-so. This may or may not be possible with human beings. One thing is certain -- we're not bees.

This is false, or at least unjustified. Sure, an equal society may not grow as fast as an unequal one, and so the latter may take the former out of the competition. But how can you conclude that such a society won't progress in isolation?

> But how can you conclude that such a society won't progress in isolation?

Don't know. We aren't bees or ants - we're tribal hierarchical apes - so we don't have a lot of isolated (or even positive) "everyone is equal here" examples to study.

The socio-biologist E.O. Wilson, when asked about such altruistic-sounding theories, responded: "Right theory - wrong species".

While it's good to examine hidden assumptions---if you're on this site, you're probably an engineer, i.e. a knowledge worker, i.e. an occupant of a profession creation of which was made possible by the advent of large and complex (though perhaps not necessarily hierarchical, although they tend to be correlated) societies.

Grain crops can be burned in the field by attackers, as well as stolen. The WP article seems to overlook the possibility of slavery in early cultures, which would put social choices about crops into a vastly different dynamic.

Slavery / undervalued labor is an interesting twist, as I imagine it would factor heavily into the value calculations.

The "more work (but still net positive food production)" vs "storage / transport" calculus seems like it would be interesting as different variables are changed. (Side note: I am not oblivious to the social evil we're talking about, but it is historically relevant)

The article fails to mention the other downside to roots: a bumper crop last year and a drought this means you still starve.

From the article:

> But the fact that grains posed a security risk may have been a blessing in disguise. The economists believe that societies cultivating crops like wheat and barley may have experienced extra pressure to protect their harvests, galvanizing the creation of warrior classes and the development of complex hierarchies and taxation schemes.

How is that a blessing? Sounds more like a curse.

Probably because the societies that developed hierarchies, taxation, and military conquered their neighbors and grew stronger and more influential in the ancient world.

I love subjects like this. But, I have a hard time believing its conclusions because it reveals more of our modern modes and assumptions than the prehistoric ones.

the paper, which isn't named in the wapo article, is 'cereals appropriability and hierarchy' here http://economics.mit.edu/files/10771.

The 'anthropological database' the wapo article describes is murdock's ethnographic atlas from 1967 and a geocoded 2013 derivative by fenske.

It's an interesting theory, but as with all of these kind of theories, mostly conjecture.

Crops are a cornerstone of human society, so it stands to reason that different crop types would after societies differently. I think this theory might be a factor in human development, but I think it would be a small one.

Usually, I avoid the comment sections on most websites, due to the alarmingly low quality...but the comments on this article are actually quite good, and provide some interesting counter arguments and additional historical context.

> Root crops, on the other hand, don't store well at all. They're heavy, full of water, and rot quickly once taken out of the ground.

"In the Altiplano, potatoes provided the principal energy source for the Inca Empire, its predecessors, and its Spanish successor. In Bolivia and Peru above 10,000 feet altitude, tubers exposed to the cold night air turned into chuño; when kept in permanently frozen underground storehouses, chuño can be stored for years with no loss of nutritional value."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_potato

Seems like the potato was more of a blessing than a curse.

Had you read the article, you'd have noticed that this exact fact is noted and asserted to support the hypothesis:

> And then there is the case of the Incas, who oversaw an empire that grew both grain and potatoes. The Incas developed a way of freeze-drying potatoes by leaving them out at high elevations. This technology allowed them to treat potatoes like a grain: non-perishable, transportable and taxable.

The inca was only one of the major pre-modern root-growing groups, and the only one which had access to freeze-drying conditions.

Obviously I did not read the article the whole way through. Thank you for setting me straight.

I can't take an article discussing the New World's technological inferiority seriously if it doesn't mention horses.

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