It’s a mystery to me why these absentee landlords didnt consolidate their plots in order to capture more income from the non-failing crops. I guess maybe things were just too chaotic during the famine for them to switch plots around or rearrange business arrangements?
However the lack of other food sources in Ireland was a predictable result of the British government putting import bans, and providing heavy export subsidies, to cereal crops.
A natural market contains diversity because rare goods pull a higher price. People are naturally incentivized to seek out un-filled needs. But the Corn Laws of 1815 distorted that natural system of incentives — natural in the sense of emerging from the desires of people connected to the market, and balanced according to their own priorities — by placing a heavy new layer of incentives on top of it.
Like if you put a ball bearing in a bowl it rolls to the center. Here the “center” represents a match between what people need and what people are producing. But if you put a magnet beside the bowl that ball bearing finds a new equilibrium point that’s not in the center any more.
In the case of the Irish Famine, it introduced a gap between the need of people to eat — what capitalists like me call “demand” — and the tendency of others to produce food and keep it in country — what capitalists like me call “supply”.
It’s a signal distortion. It’s like putting an ice cube next to the thermostat, and then your heat runs like crazy and there’s now a gap between what you want — 72 F — and what’s being produced — 102 F
It’s a mystery to me why these absentee landlords didnt consolidate their plots in order to capture more income from the non-failing crops. I guess maybe things were just too chaotic during the famine for them to switch plots around or rearrange business arrangements?
However the lack of other food sources in Ireland was a predictable result of the British government putting import bans, and providing heavy export subsidies, to cereal crops.
A natural market contains diversity because rare goods pull a higher price. People are naturally incentivized to seek out un-filled needs. But the Corn Laws of 1815 distorted that natural system of incentives — natural in the sense of emerging from the desires of people connected to the market, and balanced according to their own priorities — by placing a heavy new layer of incentives on top of it.
Like if you put a ball bearing in a bowl it rolls to the center. Here the “center” represents a match between what people need and what people are producing. But if you put a magnet beside the bowl that ball bearing finds a new equilibrium point that’s not in the center any more.
In the case of the Irish Famine, it introduced a gap between the need of people to eat — what capitalists like me call “demand” — and the tendency of others to produce food and keep it in country — what capitalists like me call “supply”.
It’s a signal distortion. It’s like putting an ice cube next to the thermostat, and then your heat runs like crazy and there’s now a gap between what you want — 72 F — and what’s being produced — 102 F