Guns Germs and Steel – the _

[2495] Thought so highly that they kept 161,600,000 of it!

Fun-quotation-that-has-something-to-do-with-Australia:

…he had confessed to repeated intercourse with sheep on a recent visit to the family farm; perhaps that was how he had contracted the mysterious microbe.

This incident sounds bizarrely one-of-a-kind and of no possible broader significance. In fact, it illustrates an enormous subject of great importance: human diseases of animal origin. Very few of us love sheep in the carnal sense that this patient did. But most of us platonically love our pet animals such as our dogs and cats. As a society, we certainly appear to have an inordinate fondness for sheep and other livestock, to judge from the vast numbers of them that we keep. For example, at the time of a recent census, Australia’s 17,085,400 people thought so highly of sheep that they kept 161,600,000 of them.

Some of us adults, and even more of our children, pick up infectious diseases from our pets. Usually they remain no more than a nuisance, but a few have evolved into something far more serious… [Guns, Gems, and Steel. Chapter 11: Lethal Gift of Livestock. Page 196. Jared Diamond. 1999]

Happy Australia Day!

[2477] Diamond, consumer choice theory, marginal revolution, Marxian economics and the paradox of value

From those precursors of food production already practiced by hunter-gatherers, it developed stepwise. Not all the necessary techniques were developed within a short time, and not all the wild plants and animals that were eventually domesticated in a given area were domesticated simultaneously. Even in the cases of most rapid independent development of food production from a hunting-gathering lifestyle, it took thousands of years to shift from complete dependence on wild foods to a diet with very few wild foods. In early stages of food production, people simultaneously collected wild foods and raised cultivated ones, and diverse types of collecting activities diminished in importance at different times as reliance on crops increased.

The underlying reason why this transition was piecemeal is that food production systems evolved as a result of the accumulation of many separate decisions about allocation time and effort. Foraging humans, like foraging animals, have only finite time and energy, which they can spend in various ways. We can picture an incipient farmer waking up and asking: Shall I spend today hoeing my garden (predictably yielding a lot of vegetables several months from now), gathering shellfish (predictably yielding a little meat today)? or hunting deer (yielding possibly a lot of meat today, but more likely nothing)? Human and animal foragers are constantly prioritizing and making effort-allocation decisions, even if only unconsciously. The concentrate first on favorite foods, or ones that yield the highest payoff. If these are unavailable, they shift to less and less preferred foods. [Guns, Germs, and Steel. Chapter 6: To Farm or Not to Farm. Page 107. Jared Diamond. 1999]

A lot of words.

Luckily, any economics student who has his or her bases covered will understand this as $\frac{dy}{dx} = \frac{P_x}{P_y}$ in one way or the other. Simple! We can thank the marginal revolution that began in the late 19^th century for that. Marginal revolution also solved the paradox of value. Indeed, marginalism is the foundation of modern microeconomics, regardless of your cup of tea.

And oh, did you know that the marginal revolution also made Marxian economics in its original interpretation completely obsolete?