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The father of Major Major, a character in Catch 22, a novel by Joseph Heller, makes a good living not growing alfalfa. “The more alfalfa he did not grow, the more money the government gave him, and he spent every penny he didn’t earn on new land to increase the amount of alfalfa he did not produce.” Each day, Mr Major “sprang out of bed at the crack of noon… just to make certain that the chores would not be done.”

To this day, to be treated as a farmer in America doesn’t necessarily require you to grow any crops. According to the Government Accountability Office, between 2007 and 2011 Uncle Sam paid some $3m in subsidies to 2,300 farms where no crop of any sort was grown. Between 2008 and 2012, $10.6m was paid to farmers who had been dead for over a year. Such payments explain why Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, is promoting a rule to attempt to crack down on payments to non-farming folk. But with crop prices now falling, taxpayers are braced to be fleeced again.

From a great article in the most recent issue of The Economist. The article goes on to mention how people like the Walmart heirs, CNN founder Ted Turner, Senator Chuck Grassley, Jon Bon Jovi, and “working-class” hero Bruce Springsteen (whose net worth is estimated to stand at about $300 million) are among those hard-up rural folks who receive farm subsidies.

What is behind this state of affairs? It’s the political economy, stupid.

“Quebec does not have opinions, but only sentiments,” once said Canadian Prime Minster Sir Wilfrid Laurier, who himself hailed from Quebec. I was sadly reminded of Laurier’s quip when I read the following op-ed in La Presse (Montreal) on December 30 (what follows is a mixture of my own translation and Google Translate):

The media reports a recent spate of land purchases in Quebec by investment banks. Given the financial difficulties of farmers, those financial firms appear to have smelled a bargain. Some farmers are faced with a lack of succession within their families. Others are facing debts due to having chosen to get into a more industrialized form of agriculture.

But this multiplication of land purchases and the operation of agricultural land by large landowners likely heralds a return to sharecropping.

Without going into the details of the institution of sharecropping, a few centuries ago, large landowners leased their lands out to farmers with whom they agreed to share the harvest. In short, those landlords agreed that part of the tenants’ agricultural labor, of which they appropriated the benefits, could go to the tenants themselves. Those tenant farmers were more or less agricultural laborers.

The gradual emancipation of the peasantry favored a mode of production centered on the family farm. But in the last few decades, industrialization has come to pervade all areas of production, agricultural production included. This has led to the situation we see today, viz. the coexistence of family farms with other farms focused on intensive large-scale production.

With this purchase of large tracts of land in Quebec by investment banks, we return in some way to the sharecropping system of centuries past: Peasants again are becoming agricultural laborers whom landowners allow to use a plot of land for their subsistence. It is hard to imagine that such an approach represents any kind of progress.

A reader writes:

I was wondering about your own perceptions of job market etiquette, specifically a couple of issues:

1. Should a PhD candidate accept an invitation to fly out if he has absolutely no intention of ever accepting an offer that is made? It is one thing to do multiple flyouts to have some bargaining power, but presumably one has a nonzero probability of accepting any offer.

2. Should a PhD candidate hold a grudge for not being invited for a flyout because he is too good, i.e., the department does not think he would accept an offer?

This stuff has come up and it seems not everyone thinks the same way…