"If We Knew How To Do That, We Would Not Be Poor"

More on “free traffic,” etc. Samuel Bowles recalls a conversation with a poor sharecropper in the village of Palanpur, India:

…I approached a sharecropper and his three daughters weeding a small plot. The conversation eventually turned to the fact that Palanpur farmers sow their winter crops several weeks after the date at which yields would be maximized. The farmers do not doubt that early planting would give them larger harvests, but no one, the farmer explained, is willing to be the first to plant, as the seeds on any one plot would be quickly eaten by birds. I asked if a large group of farmers, perhaps relatives, had ever agreed to sow earlier, all planting on the same day, to minimize losses: ‘If we knew how to do that,’ he said, looking up from his hoe at me, ‘we would not be poor.’

--Samuel Bowles, Microeconomics 23-24 (2004)