> It does not need to be most Americans and a lot of office workers would prefer to be farmers if the wage were correct.
Most everyone would prefer to be farmers (= farm owners = capitalist of at least the petit bourgeoisie, if not actually the haut bourgeoisie) instead of wage laborers.
But, no, I don't think that many office workers would prefer to be manual laborers, whether farm laborers or otherwise. Sure, with enough of a wage premium they might be lured away. But there are limits to the ability to pay higher real wages to farm labor, because food cost is a major basic expense to start with so higher nominal wages for farm labor necessarily (because while there is lots of aggregate profit in food, there's not lots of proportion of profit, which is where the room for absorbing wage increases without price impact comes from) means higher price index, which reduces real wages for everyone, including the farm laborers.
Some people do white collar work because they aren't physically capable of doing hard physical labor.
That includes me.
One thing missing from a lot of conversations is the detail that modern medicine is good at keeping you alive after a serious medical crisis. It's not so talented at restoring you to full function. The result is a lot of disabled people and that fact rarely enters the conversation about labor trends.
I suspect another element is that we have more pollution and what not impairing the functioning of pretty much everyone, but saying that risks being accused of being a conspiracy theory nutter. But it's been on my mind a lot here lately because pollution is down across the globe, traffic is down in my small town and my energy is -- "coincidentally" -- up and I'm getting more done than usual here lately, in spite of my underlying condition being an incurable genetic disorder.
I don't claim I know what to do - but I don't like us jumping straight to the answer that this would not work - it is like the meme "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas".
This is where an imaginative government or community runs experiments - there are people like Elon Musk's brother - have they not been thinking about this?
If we have a large number of people turning their hand to something new - the solution space will open up and we might see new business models in production and distribution.
The political is part of this - there are now large numbers of angry young people wearing masks in the cities.
Most everyone would prefer to be farmers (= farm owners = capitalist of at least the petit bourgeoisie, if not actually the haut bourgeoisie) instead of wage laborers.
But, no, I don't think that many office workers would prefer to be manual laborers, whether farm laborers or otherwise. Sure, with enough of a wage premium they might be lured away. But there are limits to the ability to pay higher real wages to farm labor, because food cost is a major basic expense to start with so higher nominal wages for farm labor necessarily (because while there is lots of aggregate profit in food, there's not lots of proportion of profit, which is where the room for absorbing wage increases without price impact comes from) means higher price index, which reduces real wages for everyone, including the farm laborers.