We Need to Change the Economy

 

   I am neither an economist nor a historian and so rely for my understanding on my own life experience and the books I have read on the subject. And so take this for what it’s worth. But here goes.

      We are confronted a contradiction. The economy we live under – I won’t call it ours – possesses immense productive and technological power. Never before have economies been capable of generating such abundance, mobility, communication, and technical control over material conditions. Yet beneath this there is also an entirely rational sense of fragility: weakening communities, declining trust, ecological exhaustion, economic insecurity, political impotence, and a pervasive feeling that the systems governing social life have escaped meaningful human direction. The problem cannot be reduced simply to greed, corruption, or poor policy, important as these may be. Nor is it merely a matter of technological change. Rather, the fragility is rooted in the deeper logic of industrial capitalism itself, especially in its contemporary global and financialized form. An economic order that the powers-that-be originally justified as a means of securing material prosperity increasingly behaves as though perpetual expansion, and thus perpetual enrichment and power of the economic elites, were itself the highest social good. Perpetual expansion means in practice the increasing political and economic power of the organizations and individuals that control investment.

     Under global capitalism, workers, farmers, and local communities are increasingly drawn into direct competition with distant labor markets and transnational systems of production – against each other, in other words. Economic decisions once embedded within particular places and cultures become subordinated to the mobility of capital and the imperatives of international competition. Communities and forms of life built slowly across generations have been dismantled within decades in the pursuit of efficiency, growth, and – the ultimate telos – shareholder return. These are plain facts.

      Technological acceleration also transforms the meaning of work itself. Industrial society has always tended toward mechanization and the fragmentation of labor, but automation now threatens not merely individual occupations but the human significance of productive life as such. Much work has become precarious, bureaucratically managed, or emptied of craftsmanship, vocation, and stable social meaning. A civilization organized around productivity increasingly undermines the dignity of labor upon which it still depends.

      Meanwhile, it is another plain fact that wealth and power flow toward forms of financial and corporate capital that are detached from direct participation in productive work or local social responsibility. The gap (not only financially but culturally, humanly) between rich investors/their managerial elites and ordinary working populations continues to widen, especially in the United States and increasingly in Europe as well. Economic “growth” persists, yet large portions of the population experience stagnation, insecurity, indebtedness, and declining influence over the conditions shaping their lives. Political institutions are unable to reverse these tendencies. Nation-states remain formally sovereign, yet multinational corporations, financial systems, and globally mobile capital frequently operate beyond effective democratic accountability. Governments oscillate between managing the social consequences of economic dislocation and facilitating the very processes producing it.

       At the level of culture, systems of communication and media increasingly shape public opinion and indeed the horizons of thought itself. Under conditions of concentrated economic and technological power, alternatives to perpetual growth, consumerism, and technological acceleration often appear unrealistic or even unintelligible before they can be seriously considered. The result is not necessarily overt coercion, but a subtler ideological condition in which the existing order presents itself as the only conceivable form of modern life.

      The central question, therefore, which every political process avoids at all costs, is not simply how wealth should be distributed within the present system, but whether the underlying aims and structure of modern industrial civilization remain compatible with durable human flourishing, meaningful work, democratic self-government, and the ecological realities upon which all economies ultimately depend.

 

. . .

 

    Before industrial capitalism, economic life was usually embedded within older human realities: family, locality, religion, craft, season, and memory. Most people lived close to the sources of their subsistence and within communities shaped less by mobility than by continuity. Work was physically hard and life materially poorer than today in terms of entertainment and consumer goods, yet economic activity itself was not normally understood as an autonomous sphere governed by perpetual expansion. Poverty in the sense of not having enough for a life in dignity was more a function of upper class oppression than any material factor. Where this oppression did not exist, a good economic life was possible (I think of the Shaker villages in Kentucky at their height, for example, or what I have read about parts of Holland.) The village, the farm, the workshop, and the marketplace existed within a broader moral and social order, a social order that was typically unjust and parasitic to the productive classes but did not generally interfere with the forms of production. Production was directed primarily toward sustaining households, communities, and inherited ways of life rather than maximizing growth as an end in itself.

     Industrial capitalism gradually destroyed this older world and replaced it with another. Mechanized production, the rise of the modern corporation, industrial finance, and eventually global markets reordered society around principles of efficiency, competition, accumulation, and continual innovation. Economic life became increasingly detached from place and subordinated to abstract systems of production and exchange. Capital became mobile while communities remained rooted. The corporation, originally conceived as a limited public charter serving specific social purposes, evolved into a permanent and expansive institution whose survival depended upon continual growth, technological adaptation, and competitive advantage.

     This transformation changed not only economies but the form of human life itself. Family structures adapted to industrial labor patterns and geographic mobility. Local communities weakened as economic decisions moved farther away from the people affected by them. Work became increasingly specialized, fragmented, and bureaucratically managed. Education was reshaped to supply the needs of industrial and technological systems rather than to initiate the young into a stable moral and cultural inheritance. Even the experience of time changed. Seasonal and communal rhythms yielded to clock time, productivity metrics, schedules, deadlines, and the constant pressure toward acceleration.

   Humanity’s relation to nature also underwent a disturbing shift. Land, forests, rivers, animals, and even human labor increasingly came to be understood less as realities possessing intrinsic meaning than as resources to be optimized, extracted, and managed for production and consumption. The natural world ceased to appear primarily as a home or inheritance and increasingly appeared as material for economic activity. In this sense,  a civilizational and anthropological transformation: a new understanding of what society is, what human beings are for, and how the world itself is to be regarded.

 

. . .

 

   The changing nature of the corporation was part of this transformation. Early corporations in England and the United States were not originally understood as ordinary private associations possessing an unlimited right to exist and expand. They were chartered institutions created for specific public purposes: trade, banking, infrastructure, colonization, or education. Their charters were granted by the Crown or by legislatures and were often limited in scope and duration. The underlying assumption was that concentrated economic power required public justification because economic activity remained subordinate to the common good of the political community. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in the United States, corporations usually required individual legislative charters from state legislatures. These charters were often narrow and conditional limited duration, restricted purposes, caps on property ownership, and sometimes explicit public obligations. There was widespread suspicion of concentrated corporate power. Many Americans feared corporations could become quasi-aristocratic entities independent of democratic control. The memory of chartered monopolies like the East India Company strongly shaped this attitude.

     During the nineteenth century, however, under the pressure of business elites this understanding gradually changed among the upper classes. Industrialization, railroads, national markets, and later global finance demanded concentrations of capital and organizational scale unimaginable in earlier centuries. The modern corporation emerged as the dominant institution of industrial society because it could coordinate vast systems of production, investment, labor, and technological development across immense distances and time horizons. Corporations ceased to be understood as limited public instruments and came to be treated instead as private entities whose only obligation was continual growth, profitability, and competitive success. (A giant pile of money whose only purpose is to get bigger, as Wendell Berry once put it.)

     As this transformation took place, economic institutions acquired a degree of autonomy previously unknown in human history. The corporation became one of the central forces shaping society itself. Decisions affecting towns, families, labor, education, agriculture, and even national political life increasingly flowed from the internal imperatives of large economic systems whose logic was expansionary by nature. Competition, innovation, productivity, and shareholder return became the organizing principles for civilization itself. The pro-business Supreme Court turned them into legal person with rights to protect them from government intervention in the name of the common good (Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co., 1886, though the ground had been prepared before this; and this is the basis for allowing unlimited corporate money into elections with Citizens United).

      The problem is that such institutions cannot remain subordinated to genuinely human ends and that society itself becomes subordinated to the imperatives of economic expansion i.e. the imperative of the corporation. A humane economy requires recovering an older insight: concentrated economic power is not morally self-justifying and must remain accountable to the common good of the communities and natural worlds within which it operates.

 

. . .

 

     What is economic life actually for? Is the purpose of an economy simply the indefinite expansion of production and consumption, or is economic activity properly ordered toward the flourishing of human beings and the communities to which they belong?

      Many premodern traditions assumed that economic life existed within a broader moral horizon. For Aristotle, economics ultimately served the good life understood in ethical and political terms. Wealth was necessary, but only up to a point. The endless pursuit of acquisition detached from genuine human need appeared not as wisdom but as a distortion of human purposes. The economy assumed in much of the Bible is not much different. In a similar spirit, Josef Pieper warned that societies organized entirely around production and work risk forgetting the contemplative and spiritual dimensions of human existence. Human beings do not live by efficiency alone.

    Modern industrial capitalism – “science-capitalism-technology” as one profit generating complex (Berry) – lacks any widely shared conception of sufficiency or limit. Economic growth becomes an end in itself. Technological innovation, competitive expansion, and rising consumption come to appear self-justifying as the system has no higher account of the good capable of judging them. Under such conditions, societies struggle even to articulate what would count as “enough.” Prosperity is identified with perpetual acceleration i.e., ever-increasing profits and power (money is the power to command labor and influence).

 

    Thus materially “affluent societies” often remain restless, unstable, and dissatisfied. The system can generate abundance while simultaneously weakening many of the conditions that make human flourishing possible: durable families, rooted communities, meaningful work, cultural continuity, leisure, attention, and a stable relation to the natural world. As Wendell Berry repeatedly argues, an economy ordered primarily toward efficiency and expansion tends to treat places, traditions, and even people themselves as expendable. Likewise, E. F. Schumacher argued that economies must be judged not merely by output, but by whether they sustain genuinely human forms of life.

      And the ecological costs of perpetual expansion become increasingly difficult to ignore. The assumption that profits much increase indefinitely – expansion or “growth” must increase indefinitely – within a finite natural order creates tensions that are not merely technical but political. Herman Daly therefore argued for a “steady-state economy” oriented toward qualitative development rather than unlimited material throughput. The issue is not whether societies should improve, innovate, or alleviate poverty. The issue is whether expansion itself has become detached from any coherent understanding of human flourishing and ecological permanence.

      The modern growth economy reveals a deeper metaphysical tendency. The natural world increasingly appears less as a shared home possessing its own integrity than as a standing reserve of resources awaiting optimization and extraction. Here I recall Martin Heidegger’s warning that technological civilization risks reducing both nature and humanity to mere objects of management and utility. The danger is not technology itself, but a way of seeing in which everything acquires value only insofar as it contributes to production, efficiency, and control. A society that can’t distinguish prosperity from perpetual expansion will eventually consume the human and natural foundations upon which prosperity itself depends. The central question, therefore, is whether economic life can be subordinated to intelligible human ends: stewardship rather than extraction, sufficiency rather than endless accumulation, permanence rather than continual destabilization, and the common good rather than the autonomous expansion of impersonal systems. This will require a paradigm shift, something akin to a religious conversion.

 

. . .

 

    The modern industrial-capitalist paradigm rests upon a background picture of reality, which it conceives as fundamentally material and manipulable; nature is primarily resource; value is subjective preference (philosophical origins in Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Locke). Human beings are conceived as autonomous consumers and producers, and as basically selfish and acquisitive. Society is an aggregate of competing individuals. Industrial-technological expansion is equivalent to progress. Efficiency is the primary criterion of rationality as it promises profits. Technological expansion is inherently desirable as it promises profits. Limits are obstacles (to profits) rather than conditions for flourishing. Under this picture, there is no intrinsic principle of “enough.” If value lies primarily in preference satisfaction and technological control, expansion naturally becomes indefinite. Human desires become potentially infinite while nature becomes standing reserve for those desires. The system therefore possesses industrial dynamism but no inner principle of self-limitation. As Iris Murdoch said, we are creatures that make pictures of ourselves and then become like the picture.

      Against this, the alternative paradigm I support is based on a metaphysics of order, on limit, relation, and intrinsic meaning. Its underlying assumptions I would sketch as these propositions.

1)        reality is not raw material but a meaningful order in which human beings participate;

2)        nature possesses integrity and is not reducible to resource;

3)        human flourishing depends upon relationships, place, memory, and participation in forms of life larger than the isolated self;

4)        work is not merely income generation but participation in meaningful activity;

5)        economic life exists for the sake of human and communal flourishing rather than perpetual expansion;

6)        limits are not merely restrictions but conditions of permanence, beauty, stewardship, and intelligibility;

7)        the common good is real and irreducible to aggregate private preference;

8)        different human goods require different institutional forms.

 

Based on this, I would support something like an ecology of economic forms ordered toward different human goods. A humane economy would not abolish markets, technology, or large-scale production altogether; I would subordinate them to a more comprehensive understanding of human flourishing and the common good. Economic life would become pluralistic in structure because human goods themselves are pluralistic. Family farming, local craft production, cooperative ownership, socially accountable corporations, and publicly supervised strategic sectors would each serve different dimensions of social life. Rather than forcing all economic activity into the single logic of perpetual expansion and shareholder maximization, institutions would be judged according to whether they sustain durable human communities, meaningful work, ecological stewardship, and long-term cultural continuity.

Also I agree with the crucial distinction made by Herman Daly between trade based on comparative advantage and trade driven by absolute advantage exercised by multinational corporations. In the classical model associated with David Ricardo, trade benefits different countries because each specializes in what it can produce relatively more efficiently given its own natural conditions, skills, climate, or traditions. A country with fertile soil may export wine, while another with advanced machinery exports tools, even if one country could technically produce both more cheaply in absolute terms. Trade in this sense remains rooted in distinct peoples, places, and productive cultures. The goal is mutual benefit through specialization among relatively independent national economies. Nothing wrong with that.

 

     Contemporary globalization operates very differently. A multinational corporation may relocate production not because another country possesses a natural comparative advantage, but because wages are lower, environmental protections weaker, taxes lighter, or labor less organized. For example, a corporation headquartered in the United States or Europe close a profitable domestic factory and move production to another country where workers earn a fraction of the wages and possess fewer legal protections The corporation then sells the products back into the original market while retaining profits through global financial structures. In this case, trade is no longer primarily an exchange between distinct productive economies, but part of a single transnational system seeking absolute cost minimization across borders. The result is often downward pressure on wages, weakened local communities, environmental degradation, and the erosion of democratic economic control.

      I am thinking of one example, Union Underwear, formerly an important part of the economy of my region in Kentucky, which closed the factories in Kentucky and moved them to places like El Salvador and Honduras. Plants existed in Bowling Green, Campbellsville, Frankfort, Jamestown, Franklin, Greensburg, and Princeton. At their peak, the company’s Kentucky operations reportedly employed more than 11,000 workers. Especially after the Democratic administration of Bill Clinton “liberalized trade” (in terms of absolute, no comparative advantage), all production facilities in Kentucky were eventually closed and moved south of the border. In south-central Kentucky and similar regions, the unemployed, though not trained in economics, understood that this had nothing to do with “free trade” in the older Ricardian sense of mutually beneficial exchange between distinct productive economies but a brutal relocation of production, creating downward pressure on wages, weakening of organized labor, and eroding local industrial communities. This is one reason NAFTA became such a politically charged symbol across parts of the American working and lower-middle classes and is part of the MAGA story. Therefore, trade should be based on comparative, not absolute advantage.

     The economy of agriculture is crucial, I think. Modern agribusiness has made the survival of family farms more than difficult because the entire structure of the agricultural economy now favors scale, mechanization, consolidation, and global competition. Small and medium-sized farms must compete within international commodity markets shaped by corporations capable of producing, processing, transporting, and financing food on an industrial scale. Farmers become dependent upon expensive machinery, chemicals, patented seeds, and debt, while prices are determined increasingly far from the communities in which they live. As farms disappear, rural towns lose population, schools, churches, local businesses, and the social networks that once sustained farming communities. The issue is therefore not merely economic efficiency, but the gradual destruction of an entire way of life rooted in stewardship, local knowledge, continuity, and meaningful work. This has not had politically desirable results either.

    It is important to understand that this destruction did not occur through a neutral free market. Government policy supporting the agenda of certain corporate sectors constructed the modern agribusiness system. Subsidies and research programs heavily favored large-scale commodity production, mechanized farming, and industrial efficiency. Trade agreements integrated agriculture into global markets, thus intensifying competition and rewarding corporations able to move production and capital across borders. Weak antitrust enforcement allowed enormous consolidation in food processing, meatpacking, seed production, and distribution, leaving farmers increasingly dependent upon a small number of powerful firms. Infrastructure, credit systems, and tax policies also favored large capital-intensive operations over smaller local farms. In this sense, industrial agriculture represents not merely a technological development but a political and institutional choice shaped by deeper assumptions about growth, productivity, and economic success.

    Reversing these tendencies requires a different understanding of the purpose of agriculture itself. Instead of reducing farming to an industrial process for maximizing output at the lowest short-term cost, public policy must recognize agriculture as a cultural, ecological, and social good. Subsidies and credit could support smaller diversified farms, local food systems, and regenerative farming practices rather than primarily rewarding industrial monoculture. Stronger antitrust policies could limit corporate concentration and restore bargaining power to farmers and local communities. Regional processing, local markets, cooperative ownership, and protections against purely speculative land ownership could help rebuild rural economies. Such policies would not abolish markets or technology but subordinate them to broader human goals: stewardship of the land, stable communities, meaningful work, food security, and the long-term health of both people and nature. Read Wendell Berry on this. 

      At stake is ultimately a conflict between two visions of reality. In the first, the world appears primarily as material for technical manipulation and economic extraction, while human beings become increasingly detached individuals organized by systems of production, consumption, and administration. In the second, the world appears as a meaningful order possessing intrinsic limits and forms, within which human flourishing depends not upon endless expansion but upon participation in relationships of stewardship, responsibility, community, and care. Richer versions of this can be found in the work of Lewis Mumford, Wendell Berry, E. F. Schumacher, among others. The deepest question is whether civilization is to be organized around the indefinite expansion of power, production, and consumption, or around the cultivation of genuinely human forms of life within the limits of nature and the common good.

 

. . .

 

     What I envision is neither a return to a premodern world nor the abolition of markets, technology, or large-scale industry. We still will require advanced production, coordination, infrastructure, medicine, and scientific knowledge. The problem is not that modern civilization produces too much order or too much technology, but that nearly all areas of life are increasingly forced into a single economic logic: perpetual growth, competition, efficiency, and profit maximization. A humane economy would recognize that different human needs require different forms of economic organization.

At the local level, economic life should once again be connected to stable communities, meaningful work, and stewardship of the land. Family farming, local agriculture, skilled trades, small businesses, and regional manufacturing should not be treated as economically obsolete remnants waiting to disappear under global competition. They are essential human institutions that sustain local culture, intergenerational continuity, practical knowledge, and a healthier relation between people and the natural world. An economy ordered entirely toward scale and efficiency destroys precisely those forms of life that make societies worth inhabiting.

      Larger forms of production are probably necessary in modern societies. The question is therefore not whether such forms should exist but under what conditions and for whose benefit. Corporations should no longer be understood as autonomous institutions whose sole purpose is maximizing shareholder return. Their legal existence should once again be tied to clear social obligations and the common good. Workers should possess meaningful participation in governance and ownership through structures of co-determination and shared responsibility. Long-term stewardship of communities, labor, and the environment should take precedence over short-term financial extraction.

    Certain sectors essential to the survival and stability of society should not be governed primarily by market logic at all. Areas such as medicine, critical infrastructure, energy, defense, and perhaps parts of education should remain under strong public supervision or national direction because they concern fundamental human and political goods rather than ordinary consumer preference. A society that allows purely profit-driven incentives to govern every essential sphere risks eventually undermining its own sovereignty and moral coherence.

     Such an economy would also require limits upon the dominance of finance. In recent decades, wealth has increasingly accumulated through speculative and financial mechanisms detached from productive work and local responsibility. Economic systems should reward productive labor, craftsmanship, innovation, and stewardship more than purely extractive forms of financial accumulation. Capital should once again serve the real economy rather than the reverse.

     Underlying all of this is a different understanding of prosperity. The goal of economic life should not be perpetual enrichment without limit but the cultivation of stable, meaningful, and ecologically durable forms of human flourishing. A good society is one in which people can form families, participate in communities, engage in meaningful work, care for places they inhabit, and live within a natural world that is treated not merely as resource but as inheritance. This vision is pluralistic because human goods themselves are plural. No single institution, whether market or state, can adequately serve all dimensions of human life. A humane economy therefore requires a balance of local independence, cooperative structures, socially accountable large-scale production, and public responsibility for essential goods. The aim is not utopia, but the recovery of an economy once again ordered toward human beings rather than human beings increasingly ordered toward the demands of the economy.

 

. . .

 

This paradigm shift will require a revolution of sorts since it is incompatible with the current power structure. Of course, financial elites and their managers will prevent such possibilities from even becoming known much less debated. But I don’t want a violent revolution as in France or Russia. Catastrophes both. The basic strategy should be to use the tools of democratic government. True, at the moment the political process is in the stranglehold of financial elites, all three branches. And the media, nearly the sole access to pictures of political reality, is firmly in the hands of different corporate powers, generating ideology as on a factory line. Cut the tie between money and politics. This will require a constitutional amendment to overcome the corporation-loving Supreme Court. Restructure the media system, again cutting the ties between money and information access as well as promoting open, rational debates that reflect reality rather than ideology. And if and when enough citizens can be convinced, redefine the corporation in its original sense plus co-determination and stake-holder participation, redirecting it to specific purposes that serve the public good as defined by a free and rational democratic process. And policies that promote and protect all levels of the economy, starting with vibrant farming communities (if we can relearn the art of farming). It’s a long shot, I know, but still this form of revolution has a better chance than violence, which defeats itself. And I am under no illusions about the difficulty of growing roots, of building communities, and rediscovering the skills needed for humanly meaningful work – of changing the way we see the world and thus our very personality structure itself. But we are capable of amazing things, sometimes, when our backs are up against a wall.

 

See also my entry from December 20, 2024: The Problem of Technology and the Mechanization of the Flesh

 

Sources

 Joel Bakan. The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. New York: Free Press, 2004.

 Wendell Berry. The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977.

 Wendell Berry. The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry. Edited by Norman Wirzba. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2002.

Herman Daly. Steady-State Economics. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1977.

 Stuart Ewen. Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.

 Robert Fogel. Railroads and American Economic Growth: Essays in Econometric History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1964.

 Charles R. Geisst. Corporation Nation: How Corporations Are Taking Over Our Lives—and What We Can Do About It. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2017.

 Ron Harris. Industrializing English Law: Entrepreneurship and Business Organization, 1720–1844. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

 Thom Hartmann. Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights. Emmaus, PA: Rodale Press, 2002.

 Oscar Handlin and Mary Flug Handlin. The Origins of the American Corporation. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1945.

 Martin Heidegger. The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays. Translated by William Lovitt. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.

 Alasdair MacIntyre. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981.

 John McMurtry. Value Wars: The Global Market Versus the Life Economy. London: Pluto Press, 2002.

 Lewis Mumford. The Pentagon of Power. Vol. 2 of The Myth of the Machine. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970.

 David F. Noble. America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

 Karl Polanyi. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston: Beacon Press, 1944.

 E. F. Schumacher. Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. London: Blond & Briggs, 1973.

 Alan Trachtenberg. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982.

p.s. Several statistics strongly illustrate the long-term decline of family farming and rural America in the United States:

• The number of U.S. farms peaked at approximately 6.8 million in 1935. By 2024, the number had fallen to about 1.88 million.
• Between 2017 and 2022 alone, the United States lost more than 141,000 farms, a decline of roughly 7% in only five years.
• Since 1950, the U.S. has lost approximately 3.75 million farms, or about two-thirds of all farms existing at mid-century.
• During the same period, total farmland declined by about 323 million acres, an area larger than Texas and California combined.
• Small farms are disappearing fastest. From 2017–2022, farms producing under $5,000 annually declined by about 13%, while farms with over $1 million in annual sales increased by roughly 36%.
• Very large farms constitute only a tiny percentage of total farms, yet control a disproportionate share of agricultural production and revenue. Farms earning over $1 million annually represent only a small minority but generate a very large share of total farm sales.
• In many agricultural sectors, extreme concentration now exists. For example, a very small percentage of egg and pork operations produce the overwhelming majority of total output.
• Rural depopulation has accompanied agricultural consolidation. Rural America today contains roughly 17–20% of the U.S. population while covering most of the nation’s land area. Many rural counties continue to lose population, especially younger people.
• Rural populations are generally older, poorer, and have less access to medical care, education, and infrastructure than urban populations.
• Farm succession is becoming a major crisis. The average American farmer is aging, while many children of farming families leave for urban or professional careers because small and medium farming is increasingly economically precarious.
• Meanwhile, agricultural productivity and total output continue rising even as farm numbers decline. This means fewer and larger operations produce more food with far fewer people.

 It is not much different in Germany, where I have lived since 1993. Germans see this as even less of a problem than Americans. Germany had about 1.6 million farms in 1950. By 1990, West Germany alone had fallen to about 630,000 farms. Today Germany has roughly 255,000 agricultural holdings.

• Since 2000, the number of farms has nearly been cut in half, while total farmland declined only slightly. This means farms are becoming steadily larger and more consolidated. Average farm size increased from about 37 hectares in 2000 to roughly 65 hectares in 2023.
• Between 2010 and 2020 alone, Germany lost roughly 12–13% of its farms.
• Livestock farming shows especially strong concentration:
• pig farms declined by over 40% in ten years,
• dairy farms declined by over 36% in ten years,
• while average herd sizes increased significantly.
• Rural labor is shrinking alongside farm consolidation. Between 2010 and 2020, agricultural employment in Germany fell by about 15%.
• Many German farms now survive only through diversification or secondary income. Roughly half of agricultural holdings had additional non-farming income sources by 2020.
• Land concentration continues even where production remains high. Germany produces large agricultural output with steadily fewer farms and fewer people working the land.
• Rural succession is becoming a major crisis. Aging farmers and lack of successors are repeatedly cited as reasons for closures, including in the organic farming sector.
• Analysts at DZ Bank estimated in 2024 that Germany could fall from around 256,000 farms in 2022 to perhaps 100,000 farms by 2040 if present trends continue.
• Meanwhile, food retail and processing are increasingly concentrated. Germany’s supermarket sector is highly consolidated and strongly price-driven, placing continual pressure on farmers to produce more cheaply.

 

These statistics are important for my argument because they show that the decline of rural America is not merely anecdotal or nostalgic. It reflects a long-term structural de-struction, meaning fewer farms, larger operations, greater concentration of ownership and production, declining rural populations, and increasing dependence on industrial-scale agriculture. Unfortunately this has not translated politically into demands for a new economy but into MAGA and the AfD.

The decline of small-town and rural life in both the United States and Germany reflects a desired structural outcome within modern industrial and globalized economies. In the United States, rural counties collectively lost population during the decade from 2010 to 2020 for the first time in the nation’s history. Many small towns have experienced the closure of schools, hospitals, local businesses, and manufacturing facilities, while younger generations increasingly leave in search of education and employment opportunities elsewhere. The same in Germany, where the rural share of the population has steadily declined and many villages face aging populations, shrinking infrastructure, and the loss of local services. In both countries, regions once sustained by farming, local industry, or small-scale manufacturing have struggled under the combined pressures of economic concentration, technological change, globalization, and urban centralization. These developments reflect the deeper logic of an economic system increasingly organized around scale, efficiency, mobility, and concentration of capital – i.e. the agenda of the wealthiest investors and their managers. Industrial agriculture requires fewer farmers, large corporations absorb local businesses, and global production systems shift economic decision-making away from particular communities toward distant financial and administrative centers. As local economic independence weakens, small towns lose not only jobs but also the institutions that historically sustained communal life: schools, churches, shops, civic organizations, and stable intergenerational relationships. A self-reinforcing cycle often emerges in which population decline leads to fewer services, which in turn accelerates further outmigration and social fragmentation.

   The significance of this de-struction is therefore not purely economic. Small towns and rural communities have historically embodied forms of life rooted in continuity, memory, mutual dependence, stewardship of place, and durable human relationships. Their decline reflects the gradual displacement of locally embedded social worlds by increasingly centralized and mobile systems of production, finance, and administration. The issue is not romantic nostalgia for an idealized past, but the question of whether industrial civilization can preserve humane and stable forms of communal life under conditions of perpetual economic expansion and technological acceleration. I have witnessed this first hand in America and Germany. My first place of residence in Germany was an agricultural village. When I first came there in 1991, 48 of the 77 members of the village worked in agriculture; the old met in the cultur house on holidays and told stories of their working lives to the young. When I left only 4 worked in agriculture, if you can call driving around big tractors working in agriculture. And the young had departed. That village, centuries old, was dead. No city person sheds a tear but accepts as the inevitable outcome of economic laws every bit as deterministic as the laws of physics. Economics is largely a pseudo-science, but it functions as perhaps the most powerful ideology legitimizing the current power structure. The justification that the good of the many (as opposed to the bottom line of those relative few who control the economy)  requires the destruction of rural life is such a lie but often even the victims themselves believe it.