At the technological collapse level, there won’t be ‘jobs’. Or money, for that matter. Subsistence level societies don’t need money. Exchange is by barter or service. It’s remarkable to me how difficult it is for modern people to grasp what subsistence cultures are like. Your life revolves around food – growing or gathering or hunting – and processing it, and preserving it from other animals. You don’t have leisure for reconstructing a failed civilization. In a lush and healthy ecosystem you might not have to work that hard to eat, but that is not what we’ll have. We’ll be trying to find food in damaged, impoverished, or destroyed biomes. I know this because that’s what we already have right now.
Cows make perfectly good beasts of burden, if slow and unromantic, and we have millions and millions of cows.
Given that literally billions of people live off smallholder subsistence agriculture, I think society overall will be have a big enough pool of useful people.
Yeah; i think that what a lot of people aren’t getting is that after a collapse it won’t be the “advanced” societies that rebound from it; it’ll be the societies that already mostly make do without modern technology. Both because the disruption will be smaller, and because the people there will actually have the skillsets to survive.
Horses are not the primary animal power that ran the world, oxen are. And I use the present tense there because around 30% of the world’s subsistence agriculturalists still rely on bovine muscle power(a larger fraction just uses human muscles)
That’s not 1700s, that’s maybe 1700s BCE.
Though that’s the point of this thread. Is society going to collapse to the level of subsistence farming, like 10000bc? It’s not a given IMO. Society is pretty resilient just because huge numbers of people starve to death does not mean we revert to bronze age farmers, prior to the 20th century societies coped with massive famines and didn’t collapse. Government will be much more unstable, fragmented and probably authoritarian but won’t disappear.
Though I’m skeptical many such people exist. Maybe 50 years ago they did but your average African smallhold farmer is just as dependent on fragile international supply networks for their machinery, tools, and supplies, as your Manhattan apartment dweller. They may not have as much technology as a huge western farm, but they aren’t iron age subsistence farmers either, they use tools, fertilizer, pesticides, some machines.
Tools, sure (although, even there, they’re mostly using tools even an amateur blacksmith could whip up - hoes, spades, adzes). Modern fertilizers, pesticides and machines? Not really:
Approximately 2 out of 3 smallholder households in Sub‑Saharan Africa report no use of inorganic fertilizer. Only 16% use any agro-chemicals (fertilizers or pesticides) at all. (Cite)
Over 75% of smallholders still prepare land by hand—using hoes, sticks, diggers.
Western ignorance about what it’s really like in rural Africa will never cease to amaze me.
The more dramatic scenario for collapse was what I originally posted on, the one you quoted from in part was my attempt to create a scenario from @Lumpy’s (the OP) efforts to describe what they were looking for in more detail. I agree, a major precipitating event changes things immensely.
So, you are suggesting that Africa is better positioned to survive the crash? Cradle of civilization and sustainer of civilization in times of trouble?
If the only issue is loss of tech and its products, yes. Probably parts of Asia as well.
That cite says the opposite. It’s making the point chemical use is higher than you’d expect in smallholders in subsaharan Africa. Around two thirds of plots use inorganic fertilizer:
It also points out that while owning tractors is rare, shared shared access to them is less so.
I would bet that these famines were contained within a geographical area of an intact civilization. When the famine was over life went on. Even the Black Death, which quickly killed about half the European population, did not destroy cities, or roads, or poison rivers, or burn libraries. It was more like a natural phenomenon that temporarily decreases the population of a species.
Technological collapse will not be like that. Although it may very likely include famine and plague.
That diagram is specifically about Ethiopia; the study notes that in Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Malawi, use of fertilizers and other agro-chemicals is significantly higher than in Niger, Tanzania, and Uganda. Across all of the six nations included, two-thirds of households reported no use of inorganic fertilizer and eighty-four percent do not use agro-chemicals.
It literally says 84% use no agrochemicals.
The tractor use example, and the graph, are talking about specific country figures. The survey results cover all of them.
Despite prevailing Western thinking, Africa is not , in fact, a country
I think that excludes inorganic fertilizer or those numbers make no sense. The first words of that article are this (bolding mine)
COMMON WISDOM #1: African farmers’ use of modern inputs is dismally low.
SCORE: 2 - Mythish
FINDINGS:
- Chemical input use is not as low as is often assumed
Aah, I see the issue. I said fertilizer in the parentheses when I meant herbicides. My apologies.
Doesn’t change the larger point. It’s 66% for no inorganic fertilizer anyway.
Still pretty damn low uptake of modern inputs.
The Eighteenth Century A.D. is perhaps misleading because there was already a “global supply chain” established two hundred years previously based on oceanic trade. Talk about lost knowledge and depleted resources– being able to build a wooden sailing ship that can carry a load of cargo from Europe to the Pacific Rim and back. Which required almost literally forests of lumber to build. Before railroads ships were it as far as long-range economical cargo movement went. Europe was lucky enough to have long coastlines and barge-navigable rivers from the interior to those coastal ports. Without that market chain purely local demand would have been insufficient for the economy of scale needed for blast furnaces and the first mechanically produced goods such as cloth.
Yeah, like maybe “Soylent Green”. Civilization hasn’t collapsed (yet), but it’s sagged quite a bit.