Here is what Democratic candidate for president Michael Bloomberg said in 2016 at Oxford, in what he apparently offered up as an ad hoc history of labor, agriculture, and industry, leading up to his own sophisticated era, as reported in the New York Post:
“I could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer,” Bloomberg told the audience at the Distinguished Speakers Series at the University of Oxford Saïd Business School. “It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.”Where to start with such a mess?
The former three-term New York City mayor also addressed workers’ skills during the Industrial Revolution.
“You put the piece of metal on the lathe, you turn the crank in the direction of the arrow and you can have a job. And we created a lot of jobs. At one point, 98 percent of the world worked in agriculture, today it’s 2 percent in the United States,” Bloomberg said.
He then pointed out the difference between the economy then and today’s information economy.
“It’s built around replacing people with technology, and the skill sets that you have to learn are how to think and analyze, and that is a whole degree level different. You have to have a different skill set, you have to have a lot more gray matter”…
As is his wont, what Bloomberg now says he once wished to say, what came out of his mouth, and what he postfacto claims he meant are, as we have seen with his commentaries on race, women, and redlining, often three quite different things.
Yes, Bloomberg was talking in part about the last 3,000 years of transition from a primarily agricultural society to one that was industrial to one now dominated by the so-called informational skills.
But he did not leave it there. First, he switched back into the present tense. (“I could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer.”) Did he mean the Manhattan whizz kid could teach sophisticated Oxonians to be modern farming simpletons, or that he, the student of history, could teach them to be preindustrial simpletons? And then he added that the present information age emphasized skill sets of thinking and analyzing, as apparently does not occur in contemporary farming or manufacturing work.
In truth, Bloomberg could not teach anyone in that Oxford hall or any other room how to farm, in either ancient times or modern. If he really thinks that farming is, or was, a mere “process” of digging holes, dropping in seeds, covering them with dirt, adding water, and, presto!, up comes the corn, then he is as dense as is he is arrogant.
you put the little seed in
and turn the water spout
that's what its all about!
A little hokey pokey from the campaign trail.
I can see the video now: Farmers doing the hokey pokey as they plant...one seed at a time.
Of course they would take a break ever so often, just long enough to caress their Bible and check their gun.
And we get ready to plow through another campaign season...
you put the little seed in
and turn the water spout
that's what its all about!
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