Why Jews Don't Farm

Author Commentary for Chapter 16: Why Jews Don't Farm

By Steven E. Landsburg Posted Friday, June 13, 2003, at 4:37 PM ET

In the 1890s, my Eastern European Jewish ancestors emigrated to an American Jewish farming community in Woodbine, N.J., where the millionaire philanthropist Baron de Hirsch provided land, tools, and training at the nation's first agricultural college. [Correction, June 16, 2003: The Baron De Hirsch Agricultural College was not the first agricultural college in the United States.] But within a generation, the family had settled in Philadelphia where they became accountants, tailors, merchants, and eventually, lawyers and college professors.

De Hirsch had a vision of American Jews achieving economic liberation by working the land. If he'd had a better sense of history, he would have built not an agricultural college but a medical school, because for well over a millennium prior to the settlement of Woodbine, Jews had not been farmers—not in Palestine, not in the Muslim empire, not in Western Europe, not in Eastern Europe, not anywhere in the world.

You have to go back almost 2,000 years to find a time when Jews, like virtually every other identifiable group, were primarily an agricultural people. Around A.D. 200, Jews began to quit the land. By the seventh century, Jews had left their farms in large numbers to become craftsmen, artisans, merchants, and moneylenders—the only group to have given up on agriculture. Jewish participation in farming fell to about 10 percent through most of the world; even in Palestine it was only about 25 percent. Everyone else stayed on the farms.

(Even in the modern state of Israel, where agriculture has been an important component of the economy, it's been a peculiarly capital-intensive form of agriculture, one that employed well under a quarter of the population at the height of the Kibbutz movement, and less than 3 percent of the population today.)

The obvious question is: Why? Why did Jews and only Jews take up urban occupations, and why did it happen so dramatically throughout the world? Two economic historians—Maristella Botticini (of Boston University and Universitá di Torino) and Zvi Eckstein (of Tel Aviv University and the University of Minnesota)—have recently been giving that question a lot of thought.

First, say Botticini and Eckstein, the exodus from farms to towns was probably not a response to discrimination. It's true that in the Middle Ages, Jews were often prohibited from owning land. But the transition to urban occupations and urban living occurred long before anybody ever thought of those restrictions. In the Muslim world, Jews faced no limits on occupation, land ownership, or anything else that might have been relevant to the choice of whether to farm. Moreover, a prohibition on land ownership is not a prohibition on farming—other groups facing similar restrictions (such as Samaritans) went right on working other people's land. Nor, despite an influential thesis by the economic historian Simon Kuznets, can you explain the urbanization of the Jews as an internal attempt to forge and maintain a unique group identity. Samaritans and Christians maintained unique group identities without leaving the land. The Amish maintain a unique group identity to this day, and they've done it without giving up their farms.

So, what's different about the Jews? First, Botticini and Eckstein explain why other groups didn't leave the land. The temptation was certainly there: Skilled urban jobs have always paid better than farming, and that's been true since the time of Christ. But those jobs require literacy, which requires education—and for hundreds of years, education was so expensive that it proved a poor investment despite those higher wages. (Botticini and Eckstein have data on ancient teachers' salaries to back this up.) So, rational economic calculus dictated that pretty much everyone should have stayed on the farms.

But the Jews (like everyone else) were beholden not just to economic rationalism, but also to the dictates of their religion. And the Jewish religion, unique among religions of the early Middle Ages, imposed an obligation to be literate. To be a good Jew you had to read the Torah four times a week at services: twice on the Sabbath, and once every Monday and Thursday morning. And to be a good Jewish parent you had to educate your children so that they could do the same.

The literacy obligation had two effects. First, it meant that Jews were uniquely qualified to enter higher-paying urban occupations. Of course, anyone else who wanted to could have gone to school and become a moneylender, but school was so expensive that it made no sense. Jews, who had to go to school for religious reasons, naturally sought to earn at least some return on their investment. Only many centuries later did education start to make sense economically, and by then the Jews had become well established in banking, trade, and so forth.

The second effect of the literacy obligation was to drive a lot of Jews away from their religion. Botticini and Eckstein admit that they have little direct evidence for this conclusion, but there's a lot of indirect evidence. First, it makes sense: People do tend to run away from expensive obligations. Second, we can look at population trends: While the world population increased from 50 million in the sixth century to 285 million in the 18th, the population of Jews remained almost fixed at just a little over a million. Why were the Jews not expanding when everyone else was? We don't know for sure, but a reasonable guess is that a lot of Jews were becoming Christians and Muslims.

So—which Jews stuck with Judaism? Presumably those with a particularly strong attachment to their religion and/or a particularly strong attachment to education for education's sake. (The burden of acquiring an education is, after all, less of a burden for those who enjoy being educated.) The result: Over time, you're left with a population of people who enjoy education, are required by their religion to be educated, and are particularly attached to their religion. Naturally, these people tend to become educated. And once they're educated, they leave the farms.

Of course there are always exceptions. My great-grandfather raised chickens. But he did it in the basement of his row house in north Philadelphia. [Correction, June 16, 2003: The Baron De Hirsch Agricultural College was not the first agricultural college in the United States. At the time the college opened in 1894, there were dozens of agricultural colleges in the United States. Most were established through the 1862 Morrill Act, which had given states land grants to fund public agricultural and mechanical colleges.]

Author Commentary for Chapter 16: Hey, Gorgeous, Here's a Raise! As for you fatties, we're cutting your salaries.

By Steven E. Landsburg

Posted Monday, June 23, 2000, at 9:30 PM ET

"I know what wages beauty gives," said the poet William Butler Yeats about a century ago. Modern econometricians know more precisely. In their published research, Professors Daniel Hamermesh and Jeff Biddle estimate that if you're perceived as beautiful, you probably earn about 5 percent more than your ordinary-looking counterparts.

As beauty is rewarded, so ugliness is penalized. Ugly women earn about 5 percent less than other women, and ugly men earn about 10 percent less than other men. That's right; the market punishes men more than women for being unattractive. Moreover, men's looks haunt them at every stage of their careers: Better-looking men get more job offers, higher starting salaries, and better raises. For women, good looks will get you better raises but usually not better job offers or starting salaries. (A note on Hamermesh and Biddle's methodology: Beauty was assessed by panels of people who judged photographs of the study's subjects.)

But while men suffer more for being ugly, women—and specifically white women—suffer more for being fat. In a paper from last year, Professor John Cawley found that an extra 65 pounds typically cost a white woman 7 percent of her wages. To put this another way, if you're a seriously overweight white woman, losing 65 pounds is likely to be as lucrative as an extra year of college or three extra years of work experience. For men and for black women, weight has no effect on wages. (The people in Cawley's study self-reported their weights.)

Since beauty and slenderness are associated with good pay, we can ask which way the causality runs. Do some people look better because they earn more, or do they earn more because they look better?

Surely to some extent money buys beauty. The more you earn, the more you can spend on cosmetics, health care, and plastic surgery. And higher earnings can lead to higher self-esteem, which in turn leads to better eating habits. But Hamermesh, Biddle, and Cawley believe these effects are small, for several reasons. First, there's a limit to how much you can accomplish with cosmetics. Second, the correlation between wages and beauty is strongest among the young, who are the least likely to have benefited from health care and plastic surgery. And finally, Cawley has devised some subtle statistical tests that tend to rule out the "high wages cause self-esteem which causes better eating" theory.

If high wages don't cause beauty, then presumably beauty causes high wages. But why? One guess is that certain high-paying occupations (like "fashion model" or "romantic lead") are closed to all but the most beautiful. But that can't explain why beautiful auto mechanics earn more than plain-looking auto mechanics, beautiful teachers earn more than plain-looking teachers, and so on through a long list of occupations.

Well, then, why do employers pay more for beautiful workers? Is it just because beautiful workers are more fun to look at, or does their beauty make them more productive—say by breeding self-confidence or by attracting customers? (My boon companion Marian Heller points out that self-confidence can pay off in another way—by fostering the courage to seek better jobs and demand better raises.)

Here's some evidence that employers like beauty not for its own sake, but because it's productive: Beautiful people are more likely to be found in occupations where you'd expect beauty to matter—retail sales, waitressing, etc. If the beauty premium were generated strictly by employers' desire to look at pretty people, it would presumably draw beautiful people equally into all occupations.

Now back to the gender gap. Why do ugly men suffer more than ugly women in the labor market? Partly it's because many of the ugliest women opt out of the labor market altogether, so they aren't counted in the statistics. In fact, the ugliest married women (the ones who are rated in the lowest 6 percent lookswise) are 8 percent less likely to look for a job than married women in general. That's a pretty big effect, but Hamermesh and Biddle conclude that it doesn't come close to explaining the gender gap, which remains a bit of a mystery.

They do point out, though, that low wages are not the only penalty for bad looks, and some of the other penalties hit women a lot harder than they hit men. Ugly women tend to attract the lowest quality husbands (as measured by educational achievement or earnings potential). The effect is not symmetric, though: Beautiful women do no better on the marriage market than average women. For men, looks don't seem to affect marriage prospects at all.

Why does beauty rule the wage market? Why does the market punish fat, except when it doesn't? There's a lot we don't understand. Author Commentary for Chapter 16: Microwave Oven Liberation: Household appliances, not Gloria Steinem, ushered women into the workplace.

By Steven E. Landsburg Posted Thursday, Jan. 4, 2001, at 3:00 AM ET

Millenniums and centuries come and go, but some things remain distressingly unchanged. Nearly a thousand years ago, William the Conqueror evicted "every inhabitant from huge stretches of the countryside to provide new forests" (I quote historian David Howarth). It was the millennium's first act of environmental extremism, but by no means the last. And just over a hundred years ago, Scientific American reported that economic progress in Manhattan was near an end because the island could support only a limited number of horses. That narrowness of vision, fueled by a fundamental misunderstanding of how economies grow, continues to plague our national discourse.

In the long run, economic growth comes not from cramming more horses onto your island, or more factories into your rust belt, or even more information onto your servers, but from technological breakthroughs—not from more of the same but from the new and previously unthinkable.

By the middle of the last century, Scientific American's false vision of the future had been displaced by a new vision, expressed in the March 1949 issue of Popular Mechanics: "Where a calculator on the Eniac is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1-1/2 tons."

Wrong again, but then so was everybody. We never got any of the stuff we were promised by The Jetsons (and I have waited my whole life for the personal rocket pack), but the stuff we did get—Prozac, microwave ovens, and the Internet—turned out to be equally fabulous.

Along with new technology, the century brought new social norms. In 1900, fewer than 5 percent of women worked outside the home. The rest spent an average of 58 hours a week on housework. By 1975, that was down to 18 hours, and it's probably lower today. As housework got easier, women's social and economic status grew. That's no coincidence, according to three economists who I will refer to collectively as GSY: Jeremy Greenwood at the University of Rochester, Ananth Seshadri at the University of Wisconsin, and Mehmet Yorukoglu at the University of Chicago. GSY contend that women's liberation is a direct consequence of the "housework revolution" that brought about the advent of central heating, dryers, electric irons, frozen foods, refrigerators, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and running water. Here's GSY's account of a typical housewife's laundry day in 1900: First, our heroine ports water to the stove and heats it by burning wood or coal. Then she cleans the clothes by hand, rinses them, wrings them out (either by hand or with a mechanical wringer), then hangs them to dry and moves on to the oppressive task of ironing, using heavy flatirons that are heated continuously on the stove. By 1945, things had changed: About 60 percent of households had washing machines (though essentially none had dryers). How dramatically did that change affect women's lives? In 1945, government researchers undertook to find out. The researchers observed a farm wife named Mrs. Verett while she did a 38-pound load of laundry. Without electric appliances, Mrs. Verett spent 4 hours washing and 4 1/2 hours ironing, and she walked 6,303 feet along the way. After she got a washing machine and an electric iron, she spent 41 minutes washing and 1 3/4 hours ironing, walking only 665 feet along the way.

It wasn't just laundry: At the beginning of the century, most households had no running water, and none had central heating. So, routine housework included lugging 7 tons of coal and 9,000 gallons of water around the house every year.

It's been argued that women's liberation—and more specifically the entry of women into the labor force—was driven by charismatic leaders from Elizabeth Cady Stanton through Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, or by the social upheavals associated with World War II. But the GSY team argues that women's labor force participation is a natural consequence of appliances that freed them from the drudgery of housework. Over the course of the century, those appliances have gotten cheaper; as they've gotten cheaper, they've spread to more households. As they've spread to more households, more women have entered the marketplace.

International comparisons tell the same story: By and large, the countries where durable goods are cheapest are the countries where more women work for wages. The same was true across the United States in the middle years of the century.

I'd like to see GSY apply their methods to study the men's liberation that happened earlier in the millennium, when large numbers of men left farms to go to work in the marketplace. Was that revolution also driven by technological innovations? My guess is yes, but as far as I know, nobody's done the kind of careful data analysis for men that GSY have done for women.

My prediction for this century is that technological innovation will continue to transform and enrich our lives in ways that none of us can now imagine. Of all the predictions one could have made a century ago, that was the only one that proved true.