Warning: this specific post is not about how bread was made. It's about the economics of the average farm in ancient society.<p>Was on a road trip with my girlfriend and thought she might like to learn about how bread was made. 30 min of reading later, not much to say on that topic specifically. Very interesting nonetheless.
I always love to see anything by Brett Devereux on here. His articles are one of the highlights of the week for me. Always interesting, always entertaining, and I always learn something. His blog doesn’t have an obviously visible RSS feed, but if you point your reader to it it’ll find it. I think it’s at /feed.atom or some such.
Relevant: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfIqCzQJXvYj9ssCoHq327g" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfIqCzQJXvYj9ssCoHq327g</a> , How To Make Everything, a guy trying to replicate (IIRC) a steam engine starting from nothing; i.e. making stone tools first, making pots from clay, using those tools to collect copper ore, making better tools, and so on. Very interesting. He make various kinds of bread over the years too.
The implied lack of an incentive to be taxed was good writing in this. Regrettably, for Roman occupied lands, the tax had been precomputed and sold on as a derivative. This kind of CFD doesn't play well when you can take what you want as the tax farmer.<p>Also led to 1789 in France. Post roman market economy didn't help.<p>Subsisting is only partly viable as a tax avoidance mechanism. Ultimately, you need a surplus for a lot of reasons
The discussion of risk is interesting. It is not uncommon for small farms with one or a few crops or animal species to have an annual net income which varies considerably from year to year depending on weather, disease, pests, market prices, and the cost of inputs such as fuel, fertilizer, etc. Small farmers have to tolerate variations in income greater than most salaried city dwellers.<p>The risks and consequent variations can be reduced by increasing scale, diversifying crops and animal husbandry, and by using financial tools, such as futures.<p>The history of economic development follows this trend even more so over the centuries. Business units become larger, technological processes more diverse and complex, and financial tools are created to smooth out variations in growth.<p>Thus, short term risks are reduced and mild adversities are avoided, but this comes at the cost of increasing long term risks and great catastrophes. Ultimately, global warming may put an end to this strategy.
> a meal ... consisted mostly of bread<p>This might be pendantic, but wasn't gruel ([1]) consumed more often than bread?<p>[1] - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruel" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gruel</a>
Great article, really nice style of writing.
I found many points on farming strategy and risk mitigation to be the ones frequently brought up by Nassim Taleb in his blog posts and book: hedging trough diversity and avoiding optimization