New World?

Slashdot actually has a very interesting story linked on their page (not the first time by any stretch, but this one is not pure geek). The end of agriculture as the dominant form of economy is upon us. This is, as Peter Magnusson notes, a change in 10,000 years of history. We in the West might want to think of ourselves as having passed that point some time ago, and it wouldn't be too far off, but still wrong. Until the 1980's agriculture was still the biggest form of wealth creation in the State of California--the richest state in the U.S. It is still a multi-billion dollar industry and will be for as long as we need food to live. But, though agriculture has shaped civilizations for millennia, in this age and for the first time in about 10,000 years, it's not the driving force of our world's economy.

I would still submit that it is the largest form of production and wealth creation, as services produce no wealth--they just pass money around. However, the development would still be silly to dismiss--and though we will likely not live long enough to know how it really effects society in the future--it seems reasonable to say that it will effect society greatly.

We may well have had some tastes of it already without knowing it. Agriculture in general, farming in particular, does force community. Community roads, markets, and water; fair land taxation, trade with neighboring areas. To a point, a reasonable agricultural society compels everyone from the richest to the poorest to take a common interest in, well, the dirt and everything that makes it yield production. In a service economy (and, of course in other modern industrial production), not so much. We still need markets and roads and the like, but we can pick and choose more easily from our modern abundance of options. We don't feel a common, communal suffering or a common success because we aren't nearly as dependent upon each other--or so it seems, anyway.

Perhaps now the emphasis is more upon the abstract as a result--individual liberties, privacy, equal opportunity, etc. since it's just that wide open and there is no true "common good" that is empirically obvious in nature. Perhaps we are now trying to define ourselves more as individuals and less as community members because we recognize the community as almost an abstraction itself. Or, most likely, I just don't know what I'm talking about. Still it's interesting to cerebate about.