The paradox of soil

THE history of economics has been, among other things, a story of learning to care less about land. The physiocrats of 18th-century France saw it as the primary guarantor of wealth. Adam Smith included it alongside labour and capital as one of the three factors of production that combined to generate output. A little later Thomas Malthus saw its innate scarcity as ensuring eventual catastrophe in the face of exponential population growth.

Instead of succumbing to catastrophe Western countries found ways to work around land’s scarcity, some of them ingenious—skyscrapers, artificial fertiliser, railways, suburbs—and some nefarious—dispossessing the oppressed and colonised. Improved transport allowed land farther off to do the work that land close at hand had done before, whether by producing crops half way round the world or housing workers out in the suburbs. High productivity allowed more food to be grown on fewer farms.