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<blockquote data-quote="Eldritch_Lord" data-source="post: 5595468" data-attributes="member: 52073"><p>Not really. Subsistence farmers aren't bad or unskilled farmers, they're farmers who only make enough to feed their own families because they owe all their crops to a lord, because the ground isn't fertile enough to do better, because they don't have enough land, etc. We still have plenty of subsistence farmers <a href="https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Subsistence_agriculture#Intensive_subsistence_farming" target="_blank">today</a> in remote parts of the world, and those farmers are plenty skilled enough to eke out every bit of usability out of the land they have. Calling them unskilled laborers really does them a disservice.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p>Malthus only considered food and population in his theory; if you take technological development (or in this case magic) into account, you can gain more resources from the same land as population increases without needing any catastrophes to rein in the population, just as Chinese and Indian subsistence farmers keep trying to squeeze more and more food out of their small plots of land.</p><p></p><p>That said, I don't see how a Renaissance tech level is incompatible with Malthusian theory, seeing as if <em>anything</em> fits the model of "you need violence and plagues and such to keep population down" it's D&D. In any D&D setting you have wars, monster incursions, crazy magical catastrophes, the whole shebang; Joe Commoner's lifespan is limited less by the food he can bring in every year and more by the whims of the cackling necromancer who takes over his town.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Eldritch_Lord, post: 5595468, member: 52073"] Not really. Subsistence farmers aren't bad or unskilled farmers, they're farmers who only make enough to feed their own families because they owe all their crops to a lord, because the ground isn't fertile enough to do better, because they don't have enough land, etc. We still have plenty of subsistence farmers [url=https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Subsistence_agriculture#Intensive_subsistence_farming]today[/url] in remote parts of the world, and those farmers are plenty skilled enough to eke out every bit of usability out of the land they have. Calling them unskilled laborers really does them a disservice. Malthus only considered food and population in his theory; if you take technological development (or in this case magic) into account, you can gain more resources from the same land as population increases without needing any catastrophes to rein in the population, just as Chinese and Indian subsistence farmers keep trying to squeeze more and more food out of their small plots of land. That said, I don't see how a Renaissance tech level is incompatible with Malthusian theory, seeing as if [I]anything[/I] fits the model of "you need violence and plagues and such to keep population down" it's D&D. In any D&D setting you have wars, monster incursions, crazy magical catastrophes, the whole shebang; Joe Commoner's lifespan is limited less by the food he can bring in every year and more by the whims of the cackling necromancer who takes over his town. [/QUOTE]
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