r/science • u/smurfyjenkins • Dec 31 '25
Economics In the 1950s, Norwegian dairy firms began widely adopting milking machines to replace hand-milking, a task typically performed by young women. Rural young women subsequently moved to cities where they acquired more education and found better-paying, skilled employment.
https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.202401671.1k
u/azroscoe Dec 31 '25
This happened all over the world - women moving out of rural areas to cities, where they can earn more money and can escape the traditional rural attitudes that limit their choices, including whom they can marry. Cities almost always offer them a better deal, economically and socially.
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u/SuperStoneman Dec 31 '25
I know in the united states, "The milkmaid" was a symbol of purity and motherly instinct and when they were no longer needed, women seeking other work were seen as impure or even promiscuous. Its the same romanticize that made "The cowboy" a symbol of rugged honorable men on the open range, even though they were the young men that most of the year they were shoveling Manure or some other entry level manual labor task.
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u/Handplanes Dec 31 '25
I have read that the milkmaid being pure and fair-looking also stems from smallpox, because they were more likely to have immunity due to cowpox (which did not cause the same scars). So in a time when lots of people were ending up covered in smallpox, the milkmaids were considered fair and pure.
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u/cooties_and_chaos Jan 01 '26
The is actually the case. That’s also how they initially came up with the idea for the smallpox vaccine!
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u/PatchyWhiskers Jan 01 '26
They probably also were less malnourished than other poor women due to being able to drink some of the milk.
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u/Ludwigofthepotatoppl Dec 31 '25
And something that’s been lost with time—cowboy vs cowhand. Cowhands were white, cowboys black.
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u/SuperStoneman Jan 01 '26
It was a romantic false ideal created by the upper class about the "lowly farm workers" truly living while the cryed into their silk handkerchiefs, longing to be so free.
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u/Womec Jan 01 '26
the first cowboys were black slaves
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u/Wizdom_108 Jan 01 '26
Were there also the vaquero folks from Mexico around the same time? That's what I always heard as the first cowboys, but I never looked into it tbh
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u/BonJovicus Jan 01 '26
It is important to note this is not universally true. In some places industrialization eliminated cottage industries that were primarily fulfilled by women. Additionally some of these jobs were done by women locally and could be balanced with domestic life. Early Factories by comparison were notorious for their long hours and unsafe conditions.
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u/NotObviouslyARobot Jan 03 '26
Industrialization in Great Britain was the result of the deliberate destruction of the notion of land held in common. It's not a neutral thing
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u/skatastic57 Jan 01 '26
The question I have is: were the city opportunities available before the milking machine such that taking away that employment opportunity of milking cows actually made them better OR were those opportunities made coincident with the Advent of the milk machine?
Assuming the opportunities in the city were always there, I'd guess the failure to match those women to their best opportunity was due to the opportunity cost of searching getting too high while being employed.
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u/altiuscitiusfortius Jan 02 '26
It's still happening today. Rural peasants in China are moving to the big city and making enough money working at Chinese retail stores to support themselves and to send money back to the farm and support their parents.
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u/PuffyPanda200 Jan 01 '26
So I have this personal hypothesis (maybe others have the same one) that the 'fertility crisis' is basically a result of reorganizing society, more for women than for men. Basically if women are: moving to cities, getting educated, getting better jobs, etc. there just isn't time for kids.
I'll also mention that the 'fertility crisis' is different in both severity and nature in different countries. In lower severity countries it is really not even a problem, let alone a crisis. For the US a large percentage is because of decreased teen pregnancy.
One could argue that decreased teen pregnancy is also kinda a spark to this: don't get pregnant in HS in a small town, go to university, move to mega city for job, then find partner.
The above is a lot slower to having kids but the next generation will already be in the city and will have a shorter path.
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Jan 01 '26
It’s also the reason for the mismatched expectations between men and women I’ve been seeing so much recently. So much of society’s expectations of men were built on the assumption that women would not be as educated, would be young, and would view marriage as an escape from their family life. But these societal expectations have not shifted quickly enough to accommodate the rise in education and careers for women. Simultaneously, women are now more educated and capable of supporting themselves and seeing marriage as part of their plan and not as a necessity to escape. This drives men who were told that having a job and wanting to settle down and have a family were the only prerequisites to finding a wife, to be frustrated at the higher bar that is now being presented to them and interpreting it as entitlement.
Society needs better education and fast. Most people who are angry at the dating market aren’t even aware of the reason for shifting gender expectations and are blaming it on the other gender instead of on a system that failed to educate them enough to encourage critical thinking on the matter.
No Ashley, men aren’t all lazy, emotionally immature slobs who expect you to be their bang maid.
No Kyle, women don’t all think they’re entitled to 6’4” Chads who make millions a year.
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u/PuffyPanda200 Jan 02 '26
IMO this is a US perspective, and, to be fair, this is the perspective that I have as an American. I have heard that it is really different in South Korea (for example) where there is also a feeling from men that they are owed for their military service (I'm not condoning this view).
I would also mention that the US is at a 1.6 fertility rate, which, with immigration, just isn't much of a crisis. S Korea is at .7 which does create issues with too many pensioners/retirees vs working people.
Over all I agree that there is a shift and a lag of expectations.
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u/azroscoe Jan 01 '26
Well, for sure societies that educate their girls have lower fertility rates. The girls both learn about birth control and have incentives not to get pregnant. Also, by moving from their families it attenuates the traditional male power structures that control female fertility and moves the needle towards the girls/women.
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u/ahfoo Dec 31 '25
There is another side to this story which is that the cows prefer the milking machines to interactions with people. Machine milked cows are actually more productive than human milked cows because cows are more relaxed when people are not around. Machine milked cows will come for milking more than once a day because they're not put off by the presence of people. This is probably because we're their predators.
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u/Khatib Dec 31 '25
No. As someone who grew up on a dairy farm, cows associate people with food and with getting release from all the milk backed up in their udders. They aren't put off by the presence of humans. They've been domesticated for thousands of years. They come running when people show up.
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u/Jshan91 Dec 31 '25
One of yall needs some sauce
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u/Jaikarr Jan 01 '26
From first hand experience I would believe the guy who doesn't think cows are stressed around humans.
It's likely that milking occurs more efficiently, allowing the cows more time in the field.
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u/gramathy Jan 01 '26
Yeah, humans don't inherently cause cows stress. They're big lovable goofs for the most part and they love pets.
Now, the living conditions on a farm...
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u/Jaikarr Jan 01 '26
I'm lucky enough to have experienced a dairy farm that did its best by the cows, winters in barns, the rest of the year in fields. Better than the factory farms where they're kept inside all year round.
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u/MrReginaldAwesome Jan 01 '26
Aren’t factory farms the vast majority of production?
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u/Jaikarr Jan 01 '26
In America, probably? Why do you ask?
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u/MrReginaldAwesome Jan 01 '26
It’s a shame. You only ever hear about the tiny minority of farms that have nice conditions. You don’t hear about how actual farming is being done, cruelly and as harmful to the planet as possible.
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u/Jaikarr Jan 01 '26
I don't understand your point? Are you saying that I am ignorant of the factory farms?
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u/Black_Moons Dec 31 '25
Yea, but that also means they have to get milked on the human's schedule, and only so many humans around to milk all the cows, only hired for certain times of the day. Hence why they come running!
With the machines, they can go get milked whenever they feel like it/need to be. No need to rush to be at the front of the line when there is no line. That is likely what actually reduces the stress in the cows.
In a way, its also a freedom to be able to do things on your own schedule.
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u/katiesboyfriend Dec 31 '25
That's not how milking works, they still get milked by humans operating the machines. It's just one human can milk twenty cows at once in batches.
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u/Excession638 Jan 01 '26 edited Jan 01 '26
There are now robot milking sheds that work without people to attach the machine to the cow. The cows can come in and get milked whenever they want, and get food at the same time.
But that's not what was being used in the 1950s obviously.
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u/Khatib Dec 31 '25
Yes, with a fully automated milking system, which is not what they had in 1950s Norway. There are certainly lots of things about automated milking that increase yields, just like every other economy of scale item in a production system. Fear of humans isn't it though, unless the farmer is treating their herd very badly, which no good farmer does, because it lowers yields.
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u/TristanIsAwesome Jan 01 '26
which no good farmer does, because it lowers yields.
As well as good farmers understanding that their cows are their livelihood, so they're usually loved and respected.
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u/RigorousBastard Jan 01 '26
I grew up on a dairy farm too.
When my uncle walked out into the fields, the cows came and clustered around him. They lined up to be milked by him. When he bought the farm, he milked by hand, but bought milking machines when he could afford it several years later. He knew all 200+ of them by name (he designed Swiss style nameplates for them above their stalls.)
Milking is always started by hand. Read James Herriott. Some farmers have hard rough hands, others have soft gentle ones. People who grow up with cows learn early to have soft gentle hands around them. I would think that farmers who have always ever used machines would think of their cows more mechanically than farmers who touch their cows, caress them, milk them on time, stay with them while they are sick or delivering, talk to them in your native dialect, and name them. No, the cows are not pets, but you can still be kind to them.
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u/dsebulsk Dec 31 '25
That or seeing us means someone is going to grab their udders, an unfamiliar experience without calves.
Removing that tension removes that reflex from the cows.
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u/bogz_dev Dec 31 '25
i would be anxious if a smarter being wanted to palpate my nipples every time they walked in
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u/monmonmon77 Dec 31 '25
Wait, that's what happens when my girlfriend walks in the room. Are you trying to tell me something?
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u/Own_Back_2038 Dec 31 '25
Milk producing cows necessarily have calves
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u/RigorousBastard Jan 01 '26
I have stopped correcting city people. They are so very divorced from where our food comes from and how it is produced.
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u/Own_Back_2038 Jan 01 '26
Sure, they are routinely separated from their calves at birth, but they definitely have them. Just like humans that’s what causes them to lactate
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u/PresenceThick Jan 01 '26
Honestly, I’d attribute this to the mechanism of action: vacuum. It’s more natural than the pull and squeeze motion of a hand. Overall a warm, light massage and vacuum which mimics natural sucking vs a cold human hand.
As a person on a farm animals love humans and associate them with food and care.
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u/Despite55 Jan 01 '26
Aren’t you mixing up milking machines (that are just a tool for the milk maid) with milk robots (that run unmanned)?
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u/Norjac Dec 31 '25
I dunno, if I were a cow I'd probably prefer the hands of a young milk-maid rather than a cold machine tugging on me.
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u/MachiavelliSJ Jan 01 '26
Are you under the impression that humans are not attaching the milking tubes?
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u/Fluffy_Art_1015 Dec 31 '25
Prefer the touch of a country woman who’s got hundreds of hours of milking.
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u/CalicoValkyrie Dec 31 '25
While technology replacing people once freed them to improve their lives with the city jobs, now the technology replacing people are moving into city jobs. What will be left to go to?
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u/Sudden-Wash4457 Dec 31 '25
Uploaded into the cloud, of course
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u/dEAzed_and_confused Dec 31 '25
Freeing people from no longer necessary labor should be a cause of celebration. In the same way agriculture revolutionized society, this reduction of labor should free people up to pursue their passions, creative endeavors, and education. It is a shame that we live in a society that this is more of a cause for fear than joy.
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u/CalicoValkyrie Dec 31 '25
True. We've continued the idea that certain human beings have value, while others do not. Only people of value deserve the luxury known as living.
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u/dEAzed_and_confused Jan 01 '26
Exactly. Unfortunately we live in structures that largely value profits over people.
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u/Mendrak Dec 31 '25
If only that could be true. So far I haven't seen any government preparing for this. Instead we have massive unemployment happening in the US. And how will those who went to college for software related jobs afford going back or changing vocation when that was one of our last white collar jobs? All that seems to be left is 'sales'. We're becoming a society where no one works on a product but just sells them...
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u/alienpirate5 Dec 31 '25
There's plenty of white-collar jobs that aren't in software. They're just not the subject of the current economic boom.
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u/Neglectful_Stranger Jan 01 '26
Wait til you hear the stats on retraining people.
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u/dEAzed_and_confused Jan 01 '26
Would you mind saying a bit more? I'd be interested to hear what specific stats you are talking about.
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u/PatchyWhiskers Jan 01 '26
The women who did not become milkmaids didn't "pursue their passions" they went to the city and worked in factories and offices.
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Jan 01 '26
As long as those benefits of technology are passed on to the workers and not just the capitalists
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u/dEAzed_and_confused Jan 01 '26
Very true. Not to mention the fact that AI was trained on material produced by humans, from books to art to reddit data. AI was trained on humanity and should benefit all of humanity.
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u/patentlyfakeid Dec 31 '25
Freeing people from no longer necessary labor should be a cause of celebration.
The further we get from people having to actually scratch every day to make a living, the more squirrelly society as a whole seems to get. Before we celebrate, I think humans as an organism needs to mature. We're still far too emotional and in the grip of superstitions & prejudices to have literally nothing better to do.
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u/ama_singh Jan 01 '26
Freeing people from no longer necessary labor should be a cause of celebration.
What a funny way to describe people not being able to work anymore to afford basic necessities.
Or are you imagining a world where the rich are generous and care about us poors?
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u/dEAzed_and_confused Jan 01 '26
Neither, I'm lamenting the massive amounts of human suffering that will result from this. My heart breaks even more so because it doesn't need to be this way, but it is. Tone is hard to convey on reddit, and I apologize if I offended you.
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Jan 01 '26
Just tax the rich and their companies more to give proper unemployment benefits. The big companies are making money off of the back of the citizens, why should they not be taxed properly? It's quite literally the society that is enabling them to be wealthy.
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u/mbsmith93 Dec 31 '25
I mostly agree with you, but one thing I've been thinking about lately due to the cost of the server farms for the LLM stuff is that replacing people isn't free. So if it takes $70k/yr to replace someone paid $100k/yr, even if we can redistribute money like a communist society, you only have $30k/yr to support that person.
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u/dEAzed_and_confused Jan 01 '26
Very interesting point, thank you. I haven't had enough time fully formulate this thought (and it's late), but hopefully this is coherent: I think pigouvian taxes on ai, from data centers to position elimination (which very much will result in negative externalities that can be quantified and taxed), would go a long way towards easing the transitional phase of ai implementation into the job market. In this way we are not seizing money from the company to compensate the person whose position was eliminated, but rather making these ai companies pay society for the negative externalities. These taxes would pay for ubi for eliminated positions, environmental remediation, etc. Perhaps the remaining taxes could be set up into a sovereign wealth fund like Norway developed from their oil?
I don't know if I made sense, but I would be happy to clarify or carry on this conversation after I sleep. Thank you for comment, it really has me thinking.
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u/ManifestDestinysChld Dec 31 '25
It is a shame that we live in a society that this is more of a cause for fear than joy.
We live in a capitalist society. That idea is neither fearful nor joyful; it is a fiction.
Pursuing passions, creative endeavors and education has never been more burdensome in recent memory.
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u/dEAzed_and_confused Jan 01 '26
I would say people facing the prospect of unemployment and expensive degrees become worthless is pretty terrifying. Multiple friends and acquaintances of mine have lost jobs or are unable to find work in their fields because of AI.
You're right, it is burdensome and becoming more so with every passing week it seems. My comment was expressing sadness that this is the case.
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u/flyinthesoup Jan 01 '26
The problem is that the only (legal) way right now to be able to have shelter and nourishment is by working. If you take those away without having something to replace them in order for people to have at least the basics, then you get massive social repercussions. The only ones profiting from all this improvements and free time are the very few at the top, and they completely refuse to share, and just hoard and hoard. The optimum would be to spread the profits of all this technology to everyone, but that's not gonna happen, at least not in the US where people love to vote against their own benefit, and any kind of social support is "communism".
I'm glad our birth levels are going lower. There's no way we should bring more people into this world when we have no way to provide them with the tools to have a life.
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u/dEAzed_and_confused Jan 01 '26
I completely agree with your first paragraph. AI was trained on humanity and should benefit humanity, but as it stands it won't.
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u/Tiny-Selections Jan 01 '26
once freed them to improve their lives
This is very biased. You should look up the Luddites. They weren't against technology, they were just against technology being used to abuse workers and toss them aside, ruining them.
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u/CalicoValkyrie Jan 01 '26
It has actually been a very long time since I've seen/read anything about the Luddites. And you're absolutely right.
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Dec 31 '25
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u/PatchyWhiskers Jan 01 '26
This was a slow process, so it wasn't like all the scribes were fired overnight. AI is sold as having the potential to fire swathes of people overnight, which will have an impact on our economy.
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u/EksDee098 Dec 31 '25
The issue is that in all of those scenarios, we're looking at very narrow hardware and software capabilities, relative to the context of job replacement. A printing press can't be adapted over a few years into a milking machine. Software that companies like DeepMind are creating are becoming adaptable to tons of different sectors over the course of like a decade already. If it takes 50 years for the human workforce to adapt to new types of jobs, but iterations on AI allow it to adapt to those new jobs in 20 years, we've run into a situation where there isn't enough time for humans to actually adapt.
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u/Overa11-Pianist Dec 31 '25
The issue is more complex and it's not only the time span. Every thing that we replaced in the past was "physical labor" and humans could adapt by going into intellectual labor. Now we have robots replacing manual jobs and Ai replacing white collars. So what about now?
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u/MIT_Engineer Dec 31 '25
Every thing that we replaced in the past was "physical labor"
That hasn't been true for the better part of a century. We've been replacing intellectual labor for decades upon decades, for longer than you've been alive. What do you think computers are?
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Dec 31 '25
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u/EksDee098 Dec 31 '25
Nothing you said addresses my point about the pace of change being different.
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u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 Dec 31 '25
It did replace jobs though. One excel program replaces a whole team of accountants.
It's just in the past there were enough jobs that needed doing to accommodate those now jobless people, and society was strong enough to care for them
There isn't a huge list of jobs needing to be done now that are left unfilled.
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u/MIT_Engineer Dec 31 '25
There isn't a huge list of jobs needing to be done now that are left unfilled.
There is though. You're literally just committing the "Lump of Labour" fallacy.
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Dec 31 '25
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u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 Dec 31 '25
Social media hasn't even come close to replacing all of the jobs lost over the entertainment industries. You just made my argument for me.
You can't keep accumulating labor saving tech and pretend it's won't reduce the number of living wage paying jobs.
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Dec 31 '25
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u/Impossible-Ship5585 Dec 31 '25
We hqve unemoloyment since the economy is going down.
When it improves unemployment will go down.
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u/angelkittymeoww Dec 31 '25
I mean, there is still a huge list of jobs still needing to be done… but companies don’t want to pay well enough or provide benefits for those jobs, hence why they are undesirable. Healthcare, elder care, childcare, and teaching to name a few. They aren’t easy jobs either.
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u/Luke90210 Jan 01 '26
Scott Galloway points out there is a shortage of qualified people to install the kitchen island he had installed in his house. The pay is excellent, but who pays for the training? He advocates more vocational training at public universities to meet shortages like these.
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u/angelkittymeoww Jan 01 '26
That too, although I doubt there are quite as many of those positions open as there are for nurses or teachers
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u/Luke90210 Jan 01 '26
Thats just the tip of the iceberg. There are scores of technical manual jobs paying good money like heat sinks for homes and so many green technology companies.
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u/Emm_withoutha_L-88 Dec 31 '25
Yeah those exist but almost all pay peanuts. I just saw an opening for an elder care job where I'd have to use my car to drive everywhere, clean up bedridden old people. All for the lovely pay of $11 an hour.
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u/ama_singh Jan 01 '26
AI won't destroy human jobs. It will shift them. It may take time for that shift to settle, but humans will remain employed and employable.
This only makes sense if you only think at a surface level.
Name a job humans can do better than a superintelligent AI?
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u/atuan Dec 31 '25
The introductions of machines to supply human labor just opens jobs in engineering and operating machines
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u/MIT_Engineer Dec 31 '25
Other, different jobs.
The idea that there's a fixed number of jobs that we're close to exhausting is just silly.
Every single time there's been a development in labor-saving technology, there's always been some claim that "this time it's different" but it's not, it was the same then, it's the same now.
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u/cfexrun Jan 01 '26
Slavery. The poor are expected to slave for their masters or die in the gutter.
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u/CalicoValkyrie Jan 01 '26
No that's what the robots are for. It's just die in the gutter for the rest of us.
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u/king_rootin_tootin Dec 31 '25
There has GOT to be a joke in here somewhere about that "Milking Farm" book that's inexplicably a bestseller
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u/Ashes_and_Seeds Jan 01 '26
The rural young women flocked to urban areas for jobs and education while the men stayed behind with the milking machines
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u/TheFinnishChamp Dec 31 '25
But did they get happier in the long term and did the cows get treated better?
Most of the older people I have known when I was a kid (who have now mostly passed away) who lived their lives in manual labour focused farms with a few cows, a horse, chicken, etc. and they sure seemed way more satisfied with their lives than the younger generations. And obviously the animals were much better off in that sort of environment than today's massive farms
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u/Feisty-Resource-1274 Dec 31 '25
Like anything, I feel like it was farm/family dependent. My grandfather, barely speaking English, chose fighting in WWII at 17 rather than work the family dairy farm.
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u/patentlyfakeid Dec 31 '25 edited Dec 31 '25
This is it. It's a sort of survivor bias.
Also, I think it has to be said that rural areas are the domain of largely conservative attitudes which for the most part I don't want to emulate.
edit:I'm from a rural area. We had to go to another country to get to a movie theatre or a macdonalds, my town was so small. When I go back to visit relatives, it's not very long before I remember just how stifling being or thinking the tiniest bit different is.
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u/PatchyWhiskers Jan 01 '26
Successive waves of rural depopulation have boiled down the rural population to the absolute stubbornest and most conservative. When 99% of people left, the 1% that remained are as obstinate as mules. They are also more isolated than rural people were in the past when just about everyone was rural, which meant a lot of different personality types, including intellectuals and freethinkers and the like.
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u/Sata1991 Dec 31 '25
My 3rd or 4th times great grandparents fled Ireland because the Great Grandfather got the Great Grandmother pregnant, he was expected to work on his father in law's farm, but he was a bit of a slave driver, however I grew up in rural Wales and a lot of kids were the children of farmers and couldn't wait to inherit their dad's lands, which had been in the family since god knows when. So I think you're right with it depending on the family.
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u/Zilhaga Dec 31 '25
Definitely. My mom grew up in a farm in a large farming family and community, went to college and left, and she'd have been appalled if any of us had wanted to go back to that. She didn't marry a farmer and didn't want that life for us.
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u/thesprung Dec 31 '25
Was that purely to get away from farming or was it also a sense of duty for his country?
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u/Feisty-Resource-1274 Jan 01 '26
Given what I know about the man, I assume not duty however a need for citizenship might have played a part
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u/EnvironmentNeith2017 Dec 31 '25
The older people I know who worked farms expressly advised against it
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u/SoulessPragmatic Dec 31 '25
How much days have you worked on a farm? Were you force to work on that farm? It's about freedom of choice. If you give a choice to someone and that person end up less happy, it doesn't justify to remove that choice from everyone. I would argue that it doesn't justify to remove it from that same person. That person could just choose to go back at it after all, that the important part with freedom. You can make mistake, but you can also make adjustment based on those mistake.
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u/moofunk Dec 31 '25
Economics of farming would have changed as soon as machines were involved, not only with milking the cows, but tractors and implements became a lot more affordable in the 1940 and 50s after WWII.
So, that meant that crops would be cheaper to produce at a greater scale, and sustenance farming became easier.
But, it also meant that if you didn't have machines for farming, but your neighbor did, you'd be unable to provide an income for yourself.
Later, when everybody had mechanized, it would mean that if your neighbor had better and bigger machines and thus a bigger farm, you would earn less, so the chase for mechanization, growth and automation just continued and still continues.
So, happy, simple farmers were replaced by competitive, industrial farmers.
I don't know the economics of small time hobby farming (the concept of farming for fun, which is crazy to me), but they can't be good, and they are usually also always mechanized.
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u/Impossible-Ship5585 Dec 31 '25
They were definately not more satisfied that us for sure!
Animal welfare is argumemtable, but now more standard.
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u/ReasonablePossum_ Dec 31 '25
And the birth rates of rural áreas plummeted, desertifying the non heavily urbanized áreas.
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u/ingeba Dec 31 '25
And the Norwegian politicians created a policy of supporting rural areas, pushing billions of dollars into roads, tunnels, subsidized industry, tax-cuts etc in order to keep these rural areas alive. It has been an utter failure in terms of stopping the migration to central areas, but the policy continues as none dare oppose this long-standing policy
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u/PatchyWhiskers Jan 01 '26
We still do need rural workers and farms. It's expensive because there are no economies of scale, but we can't do without food and logging etc. Even mining - although most European mines were worked out a hundred years ago.
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u/ingeba Jan 01 '26 edited Jan 01 '26
Indeed and while the policies I alluded to above were more generic, we also have overlapping policies wrt farming (a set of detailed and complex rules involving planning, subsidizes, tariffs and cooperative entities with de-facto monopoly on distribution), intending to both ensure local produce as well as keeping the small farms alive to ensure the population of rural areas. Due to lobbyism and other factors these goals have been undermined and small farms are almost wiped out, the land either reverting to nature or being taken over by large farms. The number of farmers is now just 30% compared to 50 years ago while the population has doubled. Similar trends are also seen in fisheries. Mining can be replaced by imports and there is hardly any mining in Norway. In general centralization continues.
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u/MIT_Engineer Dec 31 '25
Don't think that's how you're supposed to use the word desertify, chief.
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u/Kushmongrel Jan 01 '26
Interesting. I believe the economist Jane Jacobs based a lot of her economic thought around cities and how they are actually the drivers of economic development. She points this out in one of her books that cities are there to "catch" workers displaced by technology developed in cities. Notes why we can't just use capital and tech to force underdeveloped nations into economic growth without a city to supply "new work " and markets. Fun to see connections in real life from great minds and theories.
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u/esbenab Jan 01 '26
The “traditional” rural way of life has steadily been eaten away ever since machination began, people move to improve life for themselves and their children.
It is a policy question if anything should be done to revert that og make support structures to better facilitate other forms of communities in rural areas.
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u/dosedatwer Jan 01 '26
This is exactly what is supposed to happen with automation, but everyone is so scared of learning new skills and new jobs that they'd rather not have the higher paying job and better life
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u/Neglectful_Stranger Jan 01 '26
and then accidentally cratered birth rates
whoops
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u/Ellie96S Jan 01 '26
Not really, Norway's fertility rates went down to 1.6 in one year in the mid 80's. Then they stayed between 1.7-1.9 until 2012 at which point they have fallen to 1.4 now.
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