Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, Part V: Life in Cycles

throwup238 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is a great series and I’d love to see an addendum covering different staples like rice, alternative social structures like tribal systems, and the impacts of different forms of irrigation.

	▲	bell-cot 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		From memory - Prof. Devereaux has briefly touched on those a few times. But with heavy disclaimers that all are outside his own areas of historical expertise - so anyone who cares should go read accounts by subject-matter experts.

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jstanley 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> the heavy extraction regime they operate under

It might be interesting to quantify this. How does it compare to typical tax rates today?

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xen0 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Part 4c (this is quite a long series) goes into some detail here. https://acoup.blog/2025/09/12/collections-life-work-death-an...

My own interpretation is that it's difficult to precisely compare how peasants were exploited to modern taxation regimes in the developed world. Perhaps more as an unfavorable relationship with the only employer in town?

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claytonwramsey 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is covered in a previous article: https://acoup.blog/2025/09/12/collections-life-work-death-an...

In short, most peasant farmers must sharecrop at least some of their land, and on sharecropped land, extraction rates are on the order of 50% (for basically nothing in return).

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lm28469 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> extraction rates are on the order of 50% (for basically nothing in return).

Hey that's pretty much what we have in Germany, probably even higher thanks to vat, capital gains, &c.

	▲	multjoy an hour ago \| parent [-]
		You have roads, infrastructure, a social security system, hospitals, schools… The peasant got nothing.

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nosianu 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> for basically nothing in return

Basix protection and basic law? Sure, far from an ideal model we would have in mind today, the comparison is against a completely "free" society as in much much longer ago.

> must sharecrop at least some of their land, and on sharecropped land, extraction rates are on the order of 50% (for basically nothing in return).

Uhm... so half of an unknown number? That's also an unknown number then, and the very concrete "50%" means nothing.

I'm only complaining about the TL;DR, the original article is great. After reading it, I think there is no good TL;DR possible. There is too much to consider, actually reading that link seems and unavoidable if one actually wants to know. Would someone in two hundred years looking at average income in the US today as the one or two sentence TL;DR have a useful picture of what life is like in the US today?