Free Land

Posted on October 29, 2015 | 1 Comment

CropLand

Reading over at Carpe Diem when I came across this graphic.

Just a quick way of saying that through technology advances in agriculture we’ve been able to give back to nature 68% of our arable land.

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One response to “Free Land”

  1. nickgb | October 30, 2015 at 11:08 am | Reply

    Actually we haven’t given back 68% of our land, we’ve just become vastly more productive. Still using roughly same amount of land.

    That Carpe Diem site is godawful. Just absolutely awful. Look at the restaurant piece a little above this one. He tries to draw a huge conclusion about Seattle losing 700 jobs this year, saying it shows the minimum wage hike is a huge failure. “700 people who worked in the restaurant industry in January don’t have a job now.”

    Alternative explanation: They got better jobs because Seattle’s economy is booming. 700 fewer people work in the restaurant business but our labor force increased over 6,000 people. Of course, he doesn’t acknowledge that, Nor does he point out a similar dip in 1991, or one i 1999, or another one in 2008, each about 7-8 years apart. And look, the same thing happened this year, 7 years after the last. So either there’s a cycle to this for some reason, or Seattle’s minimum wage hike is a huge disaster that shed 0.5% of one industry’s jobs while growing the labor force by 10 times that number.

    Carpe Diem is a hack website trying to push political aims by skewing data. Seriously, you will be better informed ignoring it completely.

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