Subsistence economy

The quality and abundance of Great Lakes basin resources have been the foundation of the region s development since earliest European settlement. Indeed, in a little over a century, the Great Lakes Basin has evolved from a backwoods subsistence economy to a highly geared industrialized society. By way of current example ... 

Cuello was excavated by Hammond and co-workers between 1975 and 1993. It is the earliest known Preclassic Maya site, with a Preclassic occupation from ca. 1200 BC to AD 300 as well as later Classic period (AD 300-900) remains the earliest pottery-using phase (Swasey, 1200-900 BC) has not yet been found at other Preclassic sites, but the Bladen (900-600 BC) and subsequent phases match occupations elsewhere in date and material culture. The Cuello excavations have been extensively described in the report edited by Hammond (1991). Of particular relevance here are the chapters on the ecology and subsistence economy (Ch. 4) by Miksicek and by Wing and Scudder, and on the human burials (Ch. 7), by Frank and Julie Saul. More recent publications have focused on the subsistence economy (Crane and Carr 1994) and on the human skeletal remains (Saul and Saul 1997). 

The friction cost method (Koopmanschap et al. 1995) assumes that the human capital approach has a tendency to overestimate the indirect household costs. If a worker is seriously sick or dies, his job will be vacant for some time until a new person is hired or trained. However, the loss will not be there for many years. Therefore, the loss of human capital is calculated not until the time of retirement, but until the time of replacement. This approach is correct for unskilled labor in a situation of unemployment. It fits neither to a fully employed economy nor to a subsistence farmer society where there is no substitution of a father who died. 

Wolfe RJ, Walker RJ. 1987. Subsistence economies in Alaska Productivity, geography, and development impacts. Arctic Anthropology 24(2) 56-81. 

Farm economy Mainly subsistence based Still subsistence based with a small fraction of farmers engaging in commercial farming especially in the production of wheat, pyrethrum and tea. Economic dependency on credits on a steady increase escalating prices of the external inputs Subsistence based with a number of farmers engaged in market oriented production of crops such as tea, wheat, pyrethrum and also maize for market increasing Poverty, income by farm products limited as well as additional income (charcoal) - Due to poor market prices for farmers produce both locally and in the international markets... 

Kula, Measures and Men, p. 150. In Lower Burma in the 1920s and 30s, the landlord s paddy basket for receiving tenants rent in kind was nicknamed the cart-breaker" (James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia [New Haven Yale University Press, 1976], p. 71). 

It is furthermore evident that in all forms in which the direct labourer remains the "possessor" of the means of production and labour conditions necessary for the production of hts own means of subsistence, the property relationship must simultaneously appear as a direct relation of lordship and servitude, so that the direct producer is not free a lack of freedom whidi may be reduced from serfdom with enforced labour to a mere tributary relationship. The direct producer, according to our assumption, is to be found here in possession of his own means of production, the necessary material labour conditions required for the realization of his labour and the production of his means of subsistence. He conducts his agricultural activity and the rural home industries connected with it independently. .. Under such conditions the surplus-labour for the nominal owner of the bnd can only be extorted from them by other than economic pressure, whatever the form may be assumed to be. This differs from slave or plantation economy in that the slave works under alien conditions of production and not independently. Thus, conditions of personal dependence are requisite, a lack of personal... 

I shall rely heavily on the models of labour-market exploitation offered by John Roemer. These appear to me faithful to the central intuitions in Capital, white also sufTidently precise to allow us to detect and discuss problems that could not come to the surface in Marx s own analysis. In his book, Roemer offers one model in which the agents minimize their labour time subject to a constraint on consumption ("a capitalist subsistence economy") and one in which they maximize their revenue subject to a constraint on their labour time ("a capitalist accumulation econom/ ). In what follows 1 focus mainly on the latter, which is closer to actual capitalist economies. 

Consider a reproducible solution p for a precapitalist subsistence economy... at which producer u exploits producer 0. How does it come about that can exploit v7 Perhaps it is because u worked harder in the (prehistorical) past and built up a... 

The development of commerce and merchant s capital gives rise everywhere to the tendency towards production of exchange-values, increases its vc ume, multiplies it, makes it cosmopolitan, and develops money into world-money. Commerce, therefore, has a more or less dissolving influence everywhere on the producing organisation, which it finds at hand and whose different forms are mainly carried on with a view to use-value. To what extent it brings about a dissolution of the old mode of production depends on its solidity and internal structure. And whither this process of diss(rfution will lead, In other words, what new mode of production will replace the old, does not depend on commerce, but on the character of the old mode of production itself. In the ancient world the effect of commerce and the development of merchant s capital always resulted in a slave economy depending on the point of departure, only in the transformation of a patriarchal slave system devot to the pr uclion of the immediate means of subsistence into one devoted to the production of surplus-value. However, in the modern world, it results in the capitalist mode of production. ... 

Tannese patterns of kava preparation and consumption thus track important gender, age, and political differences on the island. The plant and the drink command similar symbolic importance wherever kava is known and used. Kava continues to be a key part of Pacific Island society — in subsistence and commercial economies, in political arenas, in religious ritual, old and new, in folk pharmacy, and in smoothing the course of everyday life. 

There is little disability among people barely maintaining themselves in a subsistence economy. The disabled die. As people s economic situation improves, their health, as determined by objective medical standards, improves, and so does the incidence of disability, as determined by bureaucratic stan-... 

Perhaps the single, most impressive, aflatoxin-related episode reported in recent scientific literature is an acute poisoning in an area of India in 1974 involving over 400 people and resulting in 106 deaths. The circumstances were typical of those highly conducive to excessive mycotoxin exposure, i.e., a poor, rural subsistence economy, where the people were virtually totally dependent on a single food crop (corn, Zea mays L.) that they produced themselves, and conditions were favorable for aflatoxin formation as a result of unseasonable rains that drenched the crop at harvest in the warm subtropical climate of the area. 

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