In two centuries, the labor to produce a kilogram of grain was reduced by 99.7%

Not sure why this is downvoted. The preeminent economists of the age thought that this is exactly what would happen - everyone would be working 2-4 hours a week and there would be nothing left to be done because every hour would be so damn productive.

The problem is twofold. First, there’s a lot of people in the world and bringing them out of poverty increases the economy up to 3 orders of magnitude, e.g. from living on $0.25 a day to living on $250 a day, which can suck up a whole lot of productivity gains.

And secondly, as it turns out, there’s always new places to shift demand when less and less of your budget is required just to subsist.

And then when all those “beyond sustenance” dollars all start chasing the same limited supply of goods, say, a house in the Bay Area, or even a lobster dinner…

You could make the case that we're already at that point. The system is being propped up by our ability to buy ever more stuff. Ever more people are employed in the service economy. Ie relatively low skilled but not easily automated work.

For me this is the main point of basic income. If you get to the point where people can't consume enough stuff to keep everyone employed, you end up with a situation with the class that own the means of production not having anyone to sell to, because 'the workers' don't have any income.

Then we can spend all day being chased by ads intended to bolster our discontentment and persuade us to purchase products and services we don't need.

The need for "work" is still absolutely necessary in the physical sense. All we've done is replace human/animal labor with cheap fossil fuels. The only way it could appear efficient is with dishonest accounting - intentionally ignoring the physical basis of energy production and assuming watts are infinitely cheap and substitutable.

Grain was transported by horse back then. We switched to automobiles because fuel is far denser. One semi-truck full of gasoline can provide thousands-of-trips and carry tons-and-tons of product. Ex: 1-ton of gasoline carries hundreds-of-tons of product.

In contrast, 10-tons of horse feed will only feed enough horses to carry maybe 10-tons of actual product, depending on distance.

I forget the math exactly, but there's a reason why the horse-to-automobile tranformation only took a decade. The difference between horse-feed and gasoline is completely massive and almost an unfathomable increase in efficiency, due to the ratio of "fuel-per-ton" (ie: horse bread in the 1800s vs gasoline in the modern day).

And all of the supporting infrastructure including everything it takes to maintain the governments that write and enforce trade treaties, improve the roads, launch the satellites that makes communication for efficient allocation of resources possible, etc.

That's a mostly fixed cost.

That doesn't sound right with compounding

I would assume that's because the standards of living and quality of life for an average person has gone quite up over the past couple of centuries as well.

Sure, you can produce the same amount of stuff today with much less effort than it required back then. But we also require more of the same stuff produced and also plenty of stuff that wasn't even possible to produce back then.

That is, if we want to maintain the current standards of living and quality of life (instead of that from two centuries ago). And, turns out, people vastly tend to prefer average standards of living and quality of life from today over those from 1800s.

Yes, labor needs to increase its productivity compared to capital investments if it wants raises.

Make no mistake, these productivity increases come almost entirely from capital spent, not from labor becoming better at what it does.

If labor wants to justify higher wages, it needs to do so on its own merits, not by piggybacking on the improvements that capital is responsible for, and pretending like that increase in productivity was thanks to them.

I'm not sure people who want community gardens are resisting this. It's more about being able to grow for yourself, should one choose to do so. There is a certain benefit to gardening. It is calming, while still remaining active physically. It provides a low cost food source and some benefit arises from the appreciation you get when you grow and harvest your own food.

Both productive growing and localised growing can exist together.

I don't see it as "resisting" or trying to go "back". Maybe I'm out of touch, but back when I was in school it was starting to be accepted that both (a) industrialization, globalization, and technological progress have lead to dramatically improved quality of life in general, including the ability to feed many many more people much more efficiently, and (b) the way that we're doing this at the moment is literally unsustainable, in the sense that it just won't be possible to continue to do it this way in perpetuity.

Some people take this seriously, and want to find ways to move forward (not "back") to find ways of thriving that aren't doomed to fail eventually... When you look at it that way I don't think it's "strange" at all.

It’s because for all the productivity gains, we are still working 40 hours or more a week. The gains go to the owners instead of allowing the laborers to work less. Medieval peasants has more leisure time than modern workers.

Because a big part of those gains has bad consequences on the environment.

It's not about productivity, it's about keeping that productivity while reducing externalities.

Community gardening is a form of leisure and organic food is a luxury good, neither of which are a giant step backwards for civilization.

A lot of it has to do with the governments incentivizing less efficient practices to support smaller farms.

A megacorp running a million acres would be a lot more efficient than a 1000 families running 1000 acre farms but, for various reasons, the system is biased towards the latter.

These Silicon Valley tycoons are trying to “disrupt” agriculture but they aren’t going around telling anyone what they’re up to, just buying up a bunch of land and hoping nobody notices. The political winds will not favor their usual shenanigans.

Row farming is still very labor intensive compared to other industries. Farming is hard.