Capitalists are fruit pickers: they only take a cut. Communists and pig farmers take it all

Capitalism resembles picking fruit. Communism resembles slaughtering animals.
CorporateNature Metaphor Series No 124

1. FRUIT TREES & CAPITALISM 
We plant trees and crops in expectation of a return on investment. When we pick the fruit of a tree, we are taxing the tree a percentage of its accumulated carbon and sugar, year after year. Yet, the tree preserves whatever growth does not come in the shape of fruit. This resembles the capitalist system where different people takes a cut at various levels but there is still an incentive for the tree to keep producing.

2. LIVESTOCK & COMMUNISM
When we slaughter farm animals, this is extreme taxation: we impose a 100% tax on the growth of the animal and take everything that the animal has accumulated, including the animal's life. This resembles the communist system where all surplus is expropriated by the state. No wonder that communist regimes collapse as people have no incentive to either produce or not to waste resources.

3. COMPARISON
Ironically, a vegetarian diet of eating fruit is capitalist, while eating meat is communist. Capitalists seem to be good at "milking" the goose that lays the golden eggs, while communists go for the jugular and bring both the goose and the golden eggs to an abrupt end (while promising a bright future).

Livestock
(image source: Wikipedia)

Crop rotation and alternating career stages recharge the batteries

By George ILIEV
CorporateNature Metaphor Series, No 81

In the 16th century, farmers in Flanders (Belgium) discovered the four-field crop rotation. This led to an agricultural revolution in continental Europe and in copy-cat Britain. The discovery that planting wheat, turnip, barley and clover on the same plot over four consecutive years would not exhaust the soil led to a big increase in productivity, compared with the previous practice of leaving the land to lie fallow every third year.

Modern lives and careers are starting to look similarly compartmentalised: with the end result of recharging and reinvigorating the person. The four-field crop rotation in one's career can take the form of:
a) work for a company;
b) work for yourself or start up a company;
c) travel;
d) study.

Young people in Western Europe nowadays increasingly take a gap year after high school to travel the world. Mid-career people often do it as well. This corresponds to planting turnips on your field: as the Jewish saying goes "to the worm in a turnip, the whole world is a turnip." After all, it's not a bad idea to come out of your turnip and see what other turnips in the world look like. 

Studying no longer happens only in one's youth. People often do professional degrees after working for some time, e.g. an MBA in one's late 20s / early 30s, or an EMBA in late 30s and 40s. And even beyond that, to keep up with technology advances, many professionals choose to do shorter (e.g. 3-month) IT courses. This is the experience that recharges one's career the most, similar to the effect of clover and other legumes on the soil (enriching it with nitrogen that benefits the crops thereafter).

Entrepreneurship also comes at different stages in life: one may try out an idea in their 20s (what I call Type 1 or  "wolf-type" natural entrepreneurs), then work for a company to gain experience and contacts, and then start up a company again in their 40s or 50s, tapping their accumulated expertise (which I call Type 2 or "dog-type" corporate entrepreneur). In the farming analogy, this stands for planting barley - from which craft beers for the hipsters are made.

Working for a company is the remaining (most mainstream) piece of the sequence. Good old wheat is the bread (and butter) of the global economy after all.

Apart from the four-field rotation, there is another very productive agricultural technique which was developed by the Native Americans before the rise of modernity: planting maize (corn), beans and squash simultaneously, known as the Three Sisters. However, this simultaneous recharging of the soil by growing three different crops has a much rarer analogy in the human world. It can only be pulled off by the Rennaissance Man / Woman. It takes an entrepreneurial polymath to manage to juggle with study, travel, working for a company and launching a startup at the same time. 

Crop rotation (Source: Wikipedia)

The plough was a double-edged sword for human society: economically productive but discriminatory to women

Positive technological advances sometimes lead to negative social change.
Discrimination against women stems from the invention of the plough.
By George ILIEV 

Some 8,000 years ago humans invented the plough. It was the perfect labour-saving device for efficiently bringing fresh nutrients to the surface from the soil layer below. Flipping the two layers not only buried the exhausted top layer of soil, but also covered weeds and the remains of previous crops, helping microorganisms to break down organic matter. Little did the early farmers know that, together with organic matter, this innovation was also breaking down their social structure.

Before the invention of the plough human populations lived in relative gender equality, as both men and women were economically significant contributors to society through their gender-specific occupations: hunting, gathering and primitive land tilling. The idea that women ruled the roost in a matriarchy before the dawn of agriculture has now fallen out of favour with anthropologists and archaeologist, but at least there was equality. However, the plough changed everything, as a 2011 paper by Harvard and UCLA researchers demonstrates (On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough).

Ploughing requires upper body strength and men have a natural advantage in this. Having stronger shoulders not only allows you to exert the pressure needed for efficient ploughing but also helps in maintaining control of the domesticated animals that pull the plough. So men made better ploughmen than women and over time this gave them higher socio-economic status.

We can see vestiges of the plough in modern day gender discrimination around the world: societies that relied heavily on the plough have higher rates of gender inequality.

The plough only has one cutting edge but it became a "double-edged sword" for humanity for several millennia. Should we let the plough continue to influence our world, now that we are moving on to driverless cars and artificial intelligence?

(Picture: Ploughman with Woman Planting Potatoes, by Vincent Van Gogh)