Podcast/presentation from the London School of Economics.
From Mark Rosenswag(?): "The overarching question is, we're interested in having an economy developed, to reduce poverty, hunger, to have human capital increases, increase incomes in a country, and the question is how best to do that...
"the basic idea is...you increase agricultural productivity and because of the inelasticity of price for agricultural goods it actually leads to incomes of farmers going down as output increases, and it naturally leads to pressures for people to exit from agriculture, it increases the demand for - from the surplus that occurred from the productivity increase - the demand for non-agricultural goods, and that generates both a labor force and a demand domestically for industrialization to take place...
"It would be impossible to have industrialization - to have workers not engaged in farming - if there weren't sufficient productivity that very few people could be producing the food that all the other industrial workers could consume while they're producing these manufactured goods, so it's surely good for the world..."
(H'mong village in Vietnam, author's photo)From Professor Sutton: "Growth and development means that the proportion of people in agriculture is going to fall. It's just an outcome. It happens universally."
Video here.
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