Outliers, The Story of Success

3.

The most striking fact about a rice paddywhich can never quite be grasped until you actually stand in the middle of oneis its size. It's tiny. The typical rice paddy is about as big as a hotel room. A typical Asian rice farm might be composed of two or three paddies. A village in China of fifteen hundred people might support itself entirely with 450 acres of land, which in the American Midwest would be the size of a typical family farm. At that scale, with families of five and six people living off a farm the size of two hotel rooms, agriculture changes dramatically.

Historically, Western agriculture is “mechanically” oriented. In the W est, if a farmer wanted to become more efficient or increase his yield, he introduced more and more sophisticated equipment, which allowed him to replace human labor with mechanical labor: a threshing machine, a hay baler, a combine harvester, a tractor. He cleared another field and increased his acreage, because now his machinery allowed him to work more land with the same amount of effort. But in Japan or China, farm-

ers didn't have the money to buy equipmentand, in any case, there certainly wasn't any extra land that could easily be converted into new fields. So rice farmers improved their yields by becoming smarter, by being better managers of their own time, and by making better choices. As the anthropologist Francesca Bray puts it, rice agriculture is “skill oriented”: if you're willing to weed a bit more diligently, and become more adept at fertilizing, and spend a bit more time monitoring water levels, and do a better job keeping the claypan absolutely level, and make use of every square inch of your rice paddy, you'll harvest a bigger crop. Throughout history, not surprisingly, the people who grow rice have always worked harder than almost any other kind of farmer.

That last statement may seem a little odd, because most of us have a sense that everyone in the premodern world worked really hard. But that simply isn't true. All of us, for example, are descended at some point from huntergatherers, and many hunter-gatherers, by all accounts, had a pretty leisurely life. The !Kung bushmen of the Kalahari Desert, in Botswana, who are one of the last remaining practitioners of that way of life, subsist on a rich assortment of fruits, berries, roots, and nutsin particular the mongongo nut, an incredibly plentiful and protein-rich source of food that lies thick on the ground. They don't grow anything, and it is growing thingspreparing, planting, weeding, harvesting, storingthat takes time. Nor do they raise any animals. Occasionally, the male !Kung hunt, but chiefly for sport. All told, !Kung men and women work no more than about twelve to nineteen hours a week, with the balance of the time spent dancing, entertaining, and visiting family and friends. That's, at most, one thousand hours of work a year. (When a bushman was asked once why his people hadn't taken to agriculture, he looked puzzled and said, “Why should we plant, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?”)

Or consider the life of a peasant in eighteenth-century Europe. Men and women in those days probably worked from dawn to noon two hundred days a year, which works out to about twelve hundred hours of work annually. During harvest or spring planting, the day might be longer. In the winter, much less. In The Discovery of France, the historian Graham Robb argues that peasant life in a country like France, even well into the nineteenth century, was essentially brief episodes of work followed by long peri ods of idleness.

“Ninety-nine percent of all human activity described in this and other accounts [of French country life],” he writes, “took place between late spring and early autumn.” In the Pyrenees and the Alps, entire villages would essentially hibernate from the time of the first snow in November until March or April. In more temperate regions of France, where temperatures in the winter rarely fell below freezing, the same pattern held. Robb continues:

The fields of Flanders were deserted for much of the year. An official report on the Nievre in 1844 described the strange mutation of the Burgundian day-laborer once the harvest was in and the vine stocks had been burned: “After making the necessary repairs to their tools, these vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately.”

Human hibernation was a physical and economic necessity. Lowering the metabolic rate prevented hunger from exhausting supplies People trudged and dawdled, even in summer After the revolution, in Alsace and the Pas-de-Calais, officials complained that wine growers and independent farmers, instead of undertaking “some peaceful and sedentary industry” in the quieter season, “abandon themselves to dumb idleness.”

If you were a peasant farmer in Southern China, by contrast, you didn't sleep through the winter. In the short break marked by the dry season, from November through February, you busied yourself with side tasks. You made bamboo baskets or hats and sold them in the market. You repaired the dikes in your rice paddy, and rebuilt your mud hut. You sent one of your sons to work in a nearby village for a relative. You made tofu and dried bean curd and caught snakes (they were a delicacy) and trapped insects. By the time lahp cheun (the “turning of the spring”) came, you were back in the fields at dawn. Working in a rice field is ten to twenty times more labor-intensive than working on an equivalent-size corn or wheat field. Some estimates put the annual workload of a wet-rice farmer in Asia at three thousand hours a year.