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Disguised underemployment in traditional agriculture still causes some controversy, despite a large volume of evidence. Most scholars nowadays agree that there is widespread underemployment in low-income agriculture,' but many avoid the question whether such underemployment is only seasonal or "structural," or also takes the form of "zero marginal product" to work actually done. Concentrating on the latter issue, some economists of neoclassical persuasion still treat low-income farm labor as if it always had some positive opportunity cost which is then equated with the economic or market value of such farm labor.2

Development, that much appreciated engine of economic and social progress, is more than just better techniques of production. Recent research on low-income countries has uncovered vast interactions between complementary technologies, factor costs and output prices, institutions, social stratification, and a host of incidentals specific to one place or another at one time or another. For technology to set off development thus tends to engage large parts of the entire historical process. Just what the "bottlenecks" are (or were) can only be discovered by rather detailed fact finding and analysis. The case clearly calls for scholars who are both economists and historians.

THE SOVIET PARADOX of high mechanization and continuing intensive use of hand labor in agriculture has been commented upon many times. For its level of capital intensity, Soviet agriculture is easily the least productive in the world.' The purpose of this paper is not to elaborate anew on these well-known oddities or their consequences for the current and prospective (short-run) supply of farm goods in the USSR. The problem here is: Given the collectivist ideology which found expression in the collective-farm and state-farm systems, what will mechanization ultimately do to the farm system? In countries with advanced farm mechanization and effective use of capital, such as the United States, the farm labor force tends to become rather small; a similar development is clearly under way also in western Europe.2 Farms then either remain family-scale operations or become labor-hire operations with rather few employees each, most of whom are specialists on several tasks rather than "assembly-line" workers. Advanced mechanization leads to assembly-line situations for crops and animals, but not for people. We will first analyze some of the salient features in the relation between land, workers, and capital on Soviet farms in comparison with that obtaining in certain other countries. Thereafter we will project the likely incidence of "comprehensive mechanization" (kompleksnaia mekhanizatsiia), as envisaged in current Soviet literature and its effect on farm employment and productivity, and then try to gauge its likely or possible implications for the farm system. How "collective" will it remain when mechanization becomes really comprehensive? And if this stage is not achieved, what will the system then be heading for? We may first recapitulate a few key items on manpower, output, mechanization, and productivity. For obvious reasons of convenience, 1959 is used as a bench-mark year. Soviet agricultural production has been estimated (by the U.S. Department of Agriculture) to be about lo percent of the world's output, as compared with about 16 percent for the United States.3

The accelerated tempo of change since the Industrial Revolution has naturally focussed interest on those phases of development that lead from preindustrial to industrial types of society. Economists discussing development problems, and especially those concentrating on the so-called “take-off” phase, thereby bluntly assume that the pre-industrial, “traditional” or “handicraft” types of society were static, as they easily appear when compared to the dynamic tempo of change experienced — and required — in the modern epoch.

A tendency for progress (and change, generally) to accelerate is clearly perceptible in the present epoch and has been commented upon many times. Quantitative additions to population, national income, and wealth, and other measurable indicators come larger by every decade. The number of scientifically trained persons alive in this year is much larger than the sum of all those that lived in previous generations. Revisions of even basic scientific theory occur more often than before, and the lead time between a basic invention and the blueprint for mass production grows shorter and shorter. Many among us are (or have been) inclined to regard this accelerating tempo of change as being essentially new-dating back, at most, to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Not long ago a leading economic historian, pondering the enormous consequences apparently deriving from the great breakthroughs in England since about 1770, placed emphasis on the uniqueness of this departure: 'the world was never the same again'.1 The polemic edge is directed against the beliefs of 'dialectical' historians that the course of events might have been, in some sense, predictable. As an afterthought, he admitted that 'the placidity of the pre-industrial epoch may of course be an optical illusion'. The burden of this paper is, mainly, to argue that the acceleration principle is not new but age-old, at work at least since the conquest of fire. In pre-industrial epochs, progress was slow enough for the trend to escape observation, overshadowed as it was by the much wider swings of shortand medium-term, or even secular, variation. Subsidiarily, we also want to dwell briefly on some of the likely consequences of the acceleration principle for the general interpretation of history, including changes going on now as well as those that appear to be in store for the mediumterm future.

The era of modern colonialism has also been the period of rapid and accelerating population increase throughout most of the world. The beginning of this trend was in Europe, and along with the expansion of European-originating influences, shock waves of demographic change seized larger and larger parts of mankind. The culmination of this trend may not yet be in sight; the lack of economic balance which it has brought to many countries belongs to the legacy of the colonial era and constitutes one of the principal socio-economic problems of the present and the immediate future. Its probable continuation cannot be ignored here; forecasts of population growth made by the United Nations or found in other recent literature will therefore be discussed along with the historical data on population change. The latter as well as the former must perforce be presented in rather broad terms, as magnitudes rather than as precise data.

CONTEMPORARY reaction to the Homestead Act was complex in the United States, and the judgment of posterity has included much negative criticism.' Whatever the real merits and defects of the Act, its impact on public opinion in Europe was not necessarily in keeping with the facts as they unfolded in America. European reactions to the famous Act are much less known than is the case with American public and expert opinion on the same subject. Standard literature on emigration and on the American image in Europe invariably stresses political freedom and economic opportunity as main motives for emigration. The Homestead Act is in most cases mentioned only in passing, as one among several factors in the motivation of prospective emigrants. In some cases it is claimed to have been a major motive but without evidence to bear out how important it was. We have here one of those complicated processes which together form the web of interaction between Europe and America throughout the middle and the late part of the nineteenth century. Was there any sizable impact on European minds from the Homestead Act, and if so on whom and in what direction? The question can only be treated tentatively here; definitive answers will require much more research than has already been done. Materials on the epoch and on emigration in general are abundant, but most of the research has been done in America and focused on the immigrants' arrival and how they made out in the new country. Much less research has been done in Europe on the mechanism of emigration. In some sense this may be logical, because the whole movement of people was materially much more important for America than for Europe, or so it seems. There are at least three levels on which such an impact might be traced. One is among prospective emigrants who may or may not have been prompted to the long journey by the news that land in America could be had for free. Another is on contemporary economists and

Labor surplus in agriculture is one of the central concepts in current debate about the economics of underdeveloped countries. No one doubts that there is underemployment in agriculture in developed countries, where the process of substituting capital for labor proceeds with a time lag in the downward adjustment of labor. In regard to traditional agriculture, which is usually assumed to be static, no such dynamic forces are admitted, and underemployment, whatever its meaning or causes, should be understood as static too. Further, there is little disagreement on the gains in national product and per caput income levels that can be obtained by transferring labor from a low-productive line of production (such as traditional agriculture) to more high-productive ones. "Unlimited supplies of labor, " in the sense proposed by W. A. Lewis,I are therefore an essential part of economic development theory.

This new journal, published by Gunther Franz in collaboration with a group of German scholars, offers a new forum for the discussion of the economic, social and legal history of agriculture and of modern agrarian sociology. Although the recently published first number is dominated by German writings about German problems, it is a stated intention of the review to extend its interests beyond the frontiers of the country of publication; the first number contains one English and one American contribution.

Recognition of institutional reform as an important variable for economic development has been relatively slow in coming. As with population problems, it has taken many years of debate and publicity to bring this ‘externality’ into proper focus for economists. A significant shift of informed opinion was brought to attention through the conference on land reform held in Washington, D.C., in early June 1970 as a ‘Spring Review’ by the U.S. Agency for International Development.1 An official summarisation of the Review’s results acknowledges that ‘In the past the United States has been notably reluctant to become involved in any aspect of land reform and its attitude has sometimes actually prevented progress’, but now the speaker envisaged United States policy as ‘moving from apathetic neglect to benign interest and a willingness to share in the effort’.2

Any human activity has a social aspect. The human personality, an incredibly complicated cerebral being, highly susceptible to impressions and ardently striving for survival and self- expression, is in essential respects the outcome of a social context. It is first among humans that the human becomes really human. Each one amongst us would have developed a more or less different personality, had he grown up in a different environment from that which was actually the case. Even when the majority of us is disregarded and interest is focussed on single outstanding individuals, an account of their past will have to include their own social context.

A factor basic to all questions of social organization in agriculture is the land supply per man. The average land area available per unit of manpower, and the way it changes, exercise an important influence upon the kind of farming, as regards both intensity and type of production. This in turn cannot but affect the holding structure and the attempts to change it.

We have tried, in the above chapters, to analyze the peculiar conditions which determine the possibilities of historical science. Trying to define what is feasible and what is meaningful, we have found that both coincide to a remarkable extent and tend to render the history of mass events, ‘social history’ in the broad sense, not only most feasible but also most meaningful.

The importance of the form of rural settlement for social life in the agricultural community is often stressed, both in theoretical research and in practical planning. Discussion on the topic is however often unclear, because different issues are kept together and the difference in their bearing on the subject is overlooked.

(59) The supply of land per man has been regarded as basic to all questions of socio-economic organization in agriculture. In the short run, the supply of land is often thought of as given. The complementary concept of economic supply is only gradually gaining ground. As a consequence of interaction between the productive and consumptive forces of the economy, the effective resource base becomes modified, functionally, over the longer run.

An old Chinese interpretation of life says that life consists of trivial little misfortunes of no particular significance taken one by one; the larger patterns of society and history usually escape the individual because he feels that he cannot do anything about it anyhow. So our neighbor falls off his roof and breaks his leg, and that may fill our mind for the rest of that day. And then our newspaper and television add to the day’s chronicle of incidents by telling of war, traffic accidents, crime and volcanic eruptions, airplane disasters, broken-up marriages or sweet romance in high society, topped off with a fashion show here and there. The frequency of this kind of communication fills our minds since news not only informs but also entertains us and breaks our small daily routine, while making the news media prosperous.