In many ways, it's a story about far more than just oats.
US Ag policy is so, so screwed up. But with more entrenched interests than the US has Congressmen, and probably 10X that number of full-time lobbyists - good luck trying to fix it.
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> In many ways, it's a story about far more than just oats.
Sure, and the story is about how Americans look at how they became the richest large country on the planet and endlessly ruminate on how they can have their cake and eat it too.
Oats declined as an American crop among farmers because there were more lucrative uses for the land. Literally it wasn't some grand conspiracy or external force, but simply that the crop preferred different climates and without needing it as a feedstock you could make more money growing soy or corn or countless other things.
But endlessly there are these sorts of "the children yearn for the mines" sorts of stories where Americans view anyone else producing literally anything as somehow unjustly depriving Americans. The rest of the world settled on putting the center of technology and arts and media and finance in the US, to hugely lucrative benefits for the US, with liberal free trade and IP protections and patent monopolies and a very healthy profit for Americans, but oh no someone else is making that low value crop and that needs to be undone.
"Data from the Ag Census cited by NAMA offer a compelling reason for the switch away from oats. Returns per acre are far higher for corn ($604) and soybeans ($544) than for oats ($111)."
Americans have some romance with the notion of "millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones". It's bizarre stuff.
> Americans have some romance with the notion of "millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws to make iPhones". It's bizarre stuff.
Screwing in little, little screws to make stuff used to be a pretty decent job in the US. Most people can be trained for assembly work, which really isn't the case for tech, arts, media etc.
Most of that work is super repetitive and some of it is dangerous and etc, etc. Lots of reasons not to like doing it, but having it available as an option was pretty nice. That's why there's romantic feelings.
> Screwing in little, little screws to make stuff used to be a pretty decent job in the US
Sure, I get the "romance about the past" notion, but it will never, ever be a decent job again. The clock isn't turning back, and the perverse thing is that in pursuing that "make it the 50s again" political agenda, Americans guaranteed your oligarchs are going to take ever more of the pie.
That isn't because Canada grows a low value crop. It's because people like Musk, Bezos and others are completely running away with the country while people vote against themselves chasing an absolute myth.
Fun fact -- the US goods trade deficit is literally the worst it has been in history, and every indication is it's going entirely in the wrong direction. But hey, at least Trump got a lot of bribes and you got your first trillionaire.
> Sure, I get the "romance about the past" notion, but it will never, ever be a decent job again.
That is a political thing. Pay the masses more money and they can afford domestically made products again.
It's not that difficult. Henry Ford figured that one out a century ago - when people had ample money, they could afford to consume. But when all money a company makes has to go to the stock markets because numbers must go up, there is no money left to redistribute to workers.
American workers already lead the world in earnning and spending. There is a tiny list of much smaller countries that earn more, but they spend less.
There is no option to Simply pay the masses more. A company paying Americans a healthy salary for putting in screws would rapidly go out of business.to one that imports from China. If you block imports, you just get more expensive and less stuff.
Also, the entire Henry Ford story is entirely bullshit (look it up). Ford raised wages in the 1910s because there was a labor crisis and it was brutal work, so they couldn't keep employees. The average factory worker would quit after 3 months which was extremely disruptive.
Also, the economics of the story make no sense. Even if the workers spent their entire pay bump at Ford every year, Ford would still be losing money on the idea. If a $300 raise was spent to buy a $300 car, the company only profits maybe $30 on the sale, so they are still in the hole -$270 on the raise.
Workers would have to somehow spend more than their raise on cars every year.
> American workers already lead the world in earnning and spending.
Tech workers yes, the wide masses scrape by, barely making rent. The problem with using averages is that ultra high extremes massively contort the statistic - a trap that the Biden/Harris admin didn't recognize until it was too late and they lost to Trump as a result.
As for the Ford story - I am aware that the story isn't as black and white [1]. Key thing is, what he did to retain labor was considered revolutionary for the time, and something that I do not expect to see a repeat of today, despite claims of a "labor shortage" everywhere.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1d90hf/til_t...
the Ford story isnt in between, it is very clear.
Nowhere in that source article does it say anything about "encouraging more lesiure use of automobiles". This is more magical thinking.
Higher pay to secure workers is universally understood today, from fastfood restruants to AI companies. However, OpenAI is not paying employees tens of millions in hopes that they spend more than that buying OpenAI credits on the weekend. Similarly, openai doesnt give them weekends in hopes that they get free advertising of their product.
Labor shortage is always relative to the price one is willing to pay. Where is this strawman coming from?
According to the BLS, 10x more people are employed in the manufacturing sector than the information sector, and average hourly pay is $36/hr. What are you talking about? Manufacturing employment was also much higher in the 1980s and 1990s than the 1950s - the decline didn't really start until the 2000s.
> Returns per acre are far higher for corn ($604) and soybeans ($544) than for oats ($111).
How much of that difference is "natural", and how much is the Federal Gov't spending $billions to make it so?
https://www.fsa.usda.gov/news-events/news/04-08-2026/usda-an...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agricultural_policy_of_the_Uni...
Why didn't you just research and actually provide the answer? Because you would find, quite quickly, that it's less than 1/10th of the difference, so instead just post some vague hand-wavy "but what if..." kind of open question.
And of course oats were subsidized as well. The US agricultural industry is basically soviet russia, and the entire system is hugely backstopped by the government, and an endless recipient of government welfare.
People like to eat, if they don't, there is no government
Look, my fathers and their five fathers were all tech/EECS/radio guys; I learned PCB and soldering and schematics informally.
If I had my druthers, I would've trained early and diligently for a lifelong career in Electronics Assembly, because that should have been a solid and stable industry/job market.
But I did not, and it is not, in these United States. Pity.
> The rest of the world settled on putting the center of technology and arts and media and finance in the US, to hugely lucrative benefits for the US, with liberal free trade and IP protections and patent monopolies and a very healthy profit for Americans,
The US is still the world's #2 manufacturer and it's still one of the biggest parts of the economy; 10x more people are employed in manufacturing than in the information sector. Moreover, manufacturing has been in a steep decline since the 1990s. The "romance" is people remembering well-paying jobs for people who are not interested in or cannot do tech, arts, media, or finance.
Centering your economy on those things deliberately would also be very foolish. Besides the fact you end up with a few urban cores with the rest of the country hollowed out (like the UK has seen), they are all things that are very easy to shift to other countries if there's a small cultural wind change - Hollywood especially is not in a great position in terms of "enduring global market titan."
At any rate it's absurd to say it's over and people should just give up on something that to this day employs so many people.