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Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

The other obvious answer is that the Shire is distributist in its economy.

This is the right answer. The author calls it out subtly too:

> the gap between the lower gentry and upper yeomanry isn’t very large, and most families are able to support themselves with only minimal assistance.

For those who want to fall down the rabbit hole see:

1. The Servile State by Hilaire Belloc: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64882 2. https://distributistreview.com/archive/an-introduction-to-di...

A more quality version of the epub of the servile State can be found at https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/hilaire-belloc/the-servile...

How do you mean?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism

I assume it’s a reference to how most hobbits seem to hold and manage productive land, or at least to be attached to a family that does.

(I’d not made the connection to distributism, but also get a similar sense of how their society is structured, just from reading The Hobbit and LOTR—but, this may be a biased perspective because we’re hanging around with some of the richest Hobbits that there are)

I guess the Shire is probably small enough to maintain such a political structure. J.R.R.Tolkein does model it with an ideal English countryside in mind, in which people like Bilbo Barkins, who are wise, participate in the politics of the community.

Look up distributivism. Catholics like Chesterton advocated for it as something of a middle ground between the abuses of capitalism and communism after the Pope write an encyclical on the tragedy of workers. They recognized both capitalism and communism as being abusive. Tolkien would have been aware of the theory I believe and it could have influenced him.

Distributivist thinkers promote a more localized system of government with a strong community where the ultimate goal isn't milking out all value (capitalism).

One of my issues with distributivism is I'm not sure if we'd have the technological advancements under such a system (your local community isn't going to design and manufacture an Xbox or advanced medical equipment). It does sound more equitable on paper though.

https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2014/11/distributism-...

> one of my issues with distributivism is I'm not sure if we'd have the technological advancements under such a system

What kills these systems is economies of scale.

You're citing one example, those in R&D, but it crops up as a handicap across production. The net result is such a society could really only exist if protected by a great power. (As we see with the Hobbits and Rangers.) And at that point, we're splitting hairs between a new economic system and benevolent feudalism.

I thought of the economies of scale issue, but didn't add it. I definitely agree it's an issue unless Hobbits are just really keen on not accepting cheap imports from abroad. I'd say it's also a problem globally if your country adopted such a system, but an enemy didn't and overcame your country's ability to defend itself. It's not that soldiers don't exist in such an economy, but that I don't think you'd be able to be competitive from a logistics standpoint and thus an easy target. For example, they're producing tanks and planes in a factory, while your country has a lot of rural blacksmiths.

That's pretty much the reason the world order looks the way it does. You could argue that people were happier as hunters and gatherers than as farmers, but agriculture allowed for growth in population and technology, leading to it plain outcompeting the hunting-and-gathering lifestyle. Same with industrialization and markets. You can have whatever social order you like if it's isolated, but the moment two groups clash over some resource they both covet, one of them will dominate, and the other perish - interacting societies are subject to natural selection.

> The net result is such a society could really only exist if protected by a great power.

reminds me a bit of Jim Corbett's "Goatwalking".

For those not familiar, "Goatwalking" is an amazing book. And it's back in print! Here's an article about the re-release: https://afriendlyletter.com/lets-go-goatwalking-friends/

Economies of scale become important when there are a lot of non-farmers to feed and farm labor becomes scarce. When labor is cheap and land is expensive, getting more food per acre is more important.

> Economies of scale become important when there are a lot of non-farmers to feed and farm labor becomes scarce

Economies of scale are fundamental. If 100% of your labour pool is farming, you're going to get invaded.

>One of my issues with distributivism is I'm not sure if we'd have the technological advancements under such a system

I'd take the simpler life, social harmony, leisure, equality and the rest, over the rat race with its technological advancements.

> I'd take the simpler life, social harmony, leisure, equality and the rest, over the rat race with its technological advancements.

But your ability to post here depends on technological advancements. A simple agrarian society would never have invented the medium through which we are having this conversation. Not to mention the vast majority of the other wealth in our modern society.

You're free to start such a commune. They're not illegal. People start them up all the time in the US.

The trouble is, they don't work. The Woodstock commune lasted 3 days, and the people left after turning the fields into a sewage farm. The Summer of Love in San Francisco lasted 3 months or so. There are lots of others.

The Bruderhof communities, the Amish, and many of the other peace churches are largely sustainable examples of communities which seem quite self sustaining in this vein.

Monastic communities have operated this way, to varying degrees, for millennia.

To a certain extent, even the tenured academic system reflects this sort of dynamic -- and came from the same roots.

The Amish communities are not communes. The Bruderhof has many communes, with a total of 2900 members worldwide. Doesn't sound very successful. Monastic communities and academic communities seem to survive on external donations.

"The Bruderhof run a variety of businesses that provide income to run their communities and provide common work for the members who almost all work onsite."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruderhof_Communities

Is it really a commune if they're running a capitalist business? Or is it more of a cooperative?

>The Amish communities are not communes.

Even if that's true (and, sure, they certainly aren't hippy communes), so?

Neither me (in the original comment that spawned this subthread) nor your direct parent said anything about communes or this idea being restricted to communes.

I just said "I'd take the simpler life, social harmony, leisure, equality and the rest, over the rat race with its technological advancements"

That said:

>Is it really a commune if they're running a capitalist business?

Yes - "commune" is not the same as "communist". Just means sharing stuff and living together as a close community, it's not tied to Marxism, the Paris Commune of 1870, or other such doctrines (and obviously many of the examples are religious based).

A commune is communism. The religious rationale for it is different than the Marxist rationale, but the result is the same.

> Even if that's true

It's easy to look it up.

> I just said "I'd take the simpler life, social harmony, leisure, equality and the rest, over the rat race with its technological advancements"

That's the promise of communes.

>A commune is communism. The religious rationale for it is different than the Marxist rationale, but the result is the same.

A commune is a particular living arrangement. Communism can be applied to whole states, regardless of such a living arrangement.

On top of this, "communism" and "communist" has acquired specific meaning in 2024 and much of the 20th century, which is not the idea of communal living of early Christians, of hippies, or even that of Charles Fourrier.

Words are define by their use, not by their historical origins. This is just muddying the waters.

>That's the promise of communes.

Communes are neither necessary nor sufficient for this. You could have distributivism on a larger state that's not a commune. This wouldn't make the whole country "a big commune" without distorting the meaning of the term, and more importantly, how it's colloqually understood.

And of course you can also have communes with none of those elements, like people living together with high technology, a Star Trek like commune. Or a commune of people working their ass off and considering leisure a sin. Or a highly hierarchical commune. And several other types besides. Living together and sharing resources (the essentials of a commune) doesn't promise or guarantee the rest I've mentioned.

Are Kibbutz communes?

Yes. They are also supported by Israeli tax money, as they are not self-sustaining.

>The trouble is, they don't work.

The Amish have been going strong for centuries, so there's that.

But I didn't say I want a niche commune anyway, I'd prefer society to be like that at large.

> The Amish have been going strong for centuries

Because they are protected by a superpower that allows them to continue their way of life.

> I'd prefer society to be like that at large.

So you'd be fine with giving up a good chunk of your life expectancy? Because that's what the simple societies of the past involved.

You'd be fine with giving up modern medicine, sanitation, sewage disposal? You'd be fine with having to work all day just to produce a bare subsistence amount of food, so that your body wears out much faster than in a modern society? You'd be fine with no Internet, books being rare and expensive (no printing presses), travel beyond your local village being a huge undertaking? You'd be fine with no modern hospitals, no 911 to call, no ambulance to come get you if you're injured or have a heart attack or stroke? I could go on and on.

People who yearn for "the simple life" only do so because they have never actually experienced it and have no idea what it actually entails.

The Amish community is not a commune.

The "Amish community" is a general group with a specific heritage that follows certain principles. They live in many different states.

Actual Amish people do live in a communal way, share resources, help each other, have common church practice, etc, which makes their local communities (not "the Amish community" in general) communes.

Individual Amish people own property and business and keep the profits from them. That's not being a commune.

I'm not sure if this is on the table even theoretically, as history shows that all those qualities correlate positively with technological advancement.

I'm probably biased heavily by modern upbringing, but "simpler life" sounds like a lot of mind-dumbing boredom, mixed with suffering and hard work, and defined by people dying young from trivial ailments we don't even consider dangerous today.

I read a book review [1] that discussed how land reform, specifically distributing land to small farmers, seems to be a reason why some Asian countries did well. This is about improving agricultural productivity. That's an earlier stage before industrialization, but does help make it possible.

The US could be seen as another example of the benefits of cheap or free land being widely available to small farmers, even though it didn't happen through land reform.

Tolkien wasn't writing about how to encourage economic growth, though. Rather the opposite.

[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-how-asia-works

Colonial America set up a system whereby colonists could lay claim to a piece of unused land, and if they farmed it for a while then they received ownership of it.

> I read a book review [1] that discussed how land reform, specifically distributing land to small farmers, seems to be a reason why some Asian countries did well. This is about improving agricultural productivity.

I have read that book as well:

The point of wasn't (entirely?) about agricultural productivity, but rather about giving every one / peasants a job to do to earn a living. As a country's economy progressed into higher value areas you wanted the people to leave the farms and move into factories. Over time farms should be consolidated and mechanized so that less labour is needed to produce food and more labour can create (proverbial) widgets and stuff.

The books describes this as one of Japan's 'failures': there are still a lot of small, unconsolidated farms being worked by aging farmers, with little interest from younger people on working in that area. The authors argue that the answer is to consolidate the farms and mechanize, but that seems to be a difficult thing to do in Japan, culturally speaking.

That sounds a lot like anarchist communism, what are the difference?

There are still strong property rights and ownership of the economy should be more distributed, but they don't advocate for some elite government entity to come scoop up everything and decide who gets what or outlaw people from owning land and property.

Unlike capitalism, instead of a factory making some kind of widget or product (example: ice cream) that makes one individual very rich and provides a low salary to a hundred workers, you'd have thousands of people across the country doing all kinds of jobs like that and hopefully making a living wage. Unlike communism, you don't have a fully centralized power dictating all aspects of life.

I'm no expert on this theory though and it isn't perfect. Such a society probably doesn't build an iPhone...maybe that is the point haha. Or maybe it can, but I'm guessing technological advancements and discoveries would take longer with less efficiency and specialization.

You can only extract profit from the margin of efficiency your capital adds. If people can artisanally make ice cream for $1/cone, and a million-dollar factory can make it for 10¢/cone, you can extract some portion of that 90¢. If the efficiency gains aren't large enough or you don't pass enough of your gains on to the consumers, you'll just out-competed by the artisans. So it's unfortunately the biggest innovations that hurt workers and benefit consumers the most.

Under capitalism, as soon as some business owner gets rich, everybody else goes into business to compete with him. This drives up the demand for labor and hence wages.

First, the competition is only in markets with free competition where everyone can compete. There are many market structures within a capitalist society (example - monopolies or where other barriers to entry exist) where this simply isn't true in some large scale way. Maybe you say that isn't true capitalism, but it's the form of capitalism that actually exists.

Think about fast food wages still being at minimum wage in a lot of places despite widespread competition. McDonald's CEO is rich, but their employees are still on welfare. Wages only went up during the pandemic when labor became scarce.

Everyone? Only one competitor is needed to provide competition.

Fast food wages translate directly into how the fast food is priced. Increasing min wages for fast food workers is followed immediately by price increases.

When you said "everybody else goes into business to compete with him"

I was just trying to say this isn't true in a lot of cases due to a wide range of barriers to entry. This can be legal (patents or regulations), natural monopolies like telecom...etc.

You said competition leads to higher wages and I stated that hasn't been true in a lot of places and used fast food as an example. Your response, while true doesn't seem to be relevant to what I was saying.

I know you're a lot smarter than me, so we're probably just talking past each other :)

> You said competition leads to higher wages

Less than 2% of the workers in the US work for minimum wage.

metaphysics, for a start. Rerum Novarum is fascinating reading.

They're nonexclusive options, though: dorothy day, for example, was comfortable in both camps (as much as she was comfortable in a camp at all)

tolkien saw it as the person-centric economy, and advocated for it. it’s easy enough to see the idea reflected into the Shire, itself kind of an idyll of what a good society was like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distributism

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