Tim Worstall

Farmers and Low Productivity

This rings true:

Farmers have worse health, poorer quality of life and lower
productivity than employees in any other sector, according to a new
study.

Although I’m not sure that "lower productivity" quite captures it. I wouldn’t want to have to defend this in detail, but I’ve heard that if you add up all the subsidies received and net it off against the actual production, you get a negative number: that is, that the average productivity of farmers is negative. Another way of making the same point is that the entirety of the UK agricultural sector makes us all poorer.

In

2 responses

  1. Little Black Sambo Avatar
    Little Black Sambo

    Who are farmers the employees of? The Government, I suppose.

    Reply
  2. The Englishman Avatar
    The Englishman

    I couldn’t work out how they measured productivity either.
    For the record I’m an incredibly unproductive farmer, the Taxpayer pays me to leave productive land uncultivated, hedges to be planted, crops sown just for the birds to eat etc. The public good is the wildlife, the productivity hard to measure.

    Reply

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