20 November 2003 Blog Home : November 2003 : Permalink
I finished our Olive harvest this week. The house we own on the Riviera has 15-20 Olive trees (the reason why I gave an inexact number is because 5 of them are shared with our neighbour) and after 3 years of failing to get our act together and a less than stellar attempt last year I was ready to go for gold this year. Unfortunately the harvest has been less than stellar but I have a receipt from the olive mill entitling us to 3L of oil. The descritpion below, written a year ago, explains why this years crop has been so unexceptional. Unfortunately I'm goign to have to do more pruning this year so next year may not be much better.
Olive trees, or Oliviers as the French call them, don't like giving up their fruit - especially when the trees haven't been properly maintained. Although I can take some of the blame for the lack of maintenance our neighbour - who's Italian and experienced at the business - says that really the previous owners failed to do things properly and I just failed to reverse the previous neglect. Anyway the trees need drastic pruning which means that next year's crop is going to be a good deal less. Still we've wasted a good deal of this year's crop by not picking up the daily windfalls and by other beginner errors such as misplacing the nets so perhaps we'll be able to get about the same amount of oil. The key to picking olives seems to be violence. You start by putting a net on the cround under the tree to catch the olives as they come down and then you shake and pull at the branches to get the olives to fall down. Since our olive trees are far too tall and have not been properly pruned back we need a lot of nets and very long sticks to be beat the tops of the trees. The prefered tool is a sort of plastic rake or comb on a long stick which you drag through the branches. Initially I was worried about the damage this would do to the branches and leaves since the combed tree has all sorts of broken twigs and almost as many leaves as olives fall down. However our neighbour pointed out that firstly olives grow new branches every year and old ones die off and that secondly this year in particular most of the branches will not be lasting more than another month or two as they will be victims of the great prune we plan for Christmas. I think I'm goign to buy some kind of wood chip machine as the offcuts of 15 ollive treres will make masses of mulch and possibly even firewood if I can compress it into chipwood logs.
When the olives are on the net you realise that they don't look anything like the sorts of olives you buy pickled or stuffed. These trees are the local variety which is well regarded as a producer of oil rather than edible olives so this doesn't matter. The olives are a range of colours from green to black with many a pleasant half green, half red-brown. They are also knobbly, partly insect ridden and blemished from the violence of the picking. The work of separating the olives from the leaves and twigs that came down with them is probably harder than the picking. The mill will only buy olives and will refuse loads that ahve too many bits of muck so we have to be sure that we have removed as much as we can. Unfortuntalely thousands of years of peasant thought has failed to come up with a better way to do this separation than human hands. Traditionally villages harvest their olives communally because the human interaction makes the entire job palatable. If you do it on your own its boring and tedious, but the work flows better when you cna gossip about this and that. Next year we will harvest with our neighbour so as to ensure that we get that intangible as well as his knowledge of the fruit.
One of the true joys of finally harvesting our own olives is that we get to feel a part of the local countryside and traditions. Even though the Riviera is practically suburbia these days, there are plenty of links back to the rural past. Harvesting olive trees that could be anywhere from 20 to hundreds of years old helps us feel at one with the past. Both my wife and I feel that somehow by harvesting the olives we have begun to harmonize with the garden and the house. The act of cultivating brings order to the wilderness and with a garden covered in olive trees, failing to manage the olive trees is like only cleaning half the room sin the house. Unlike most houses in the region, we live in one of the original farmhouses (un vrai mas provencal) and the olives on their terraces surrounding the house have probably been there for centuries. We don't know quite how old they are but we estimate that two or three of trees are well into their second century and that even the sprightly 20 or 30 year old ones were probably planted to replace ancestral trees that finally gave up the ghost. It is very hard to really kill an old olive tree - we have the stump of an ancient tree near the front door which has two good sized sprouts - so I'm sure that the trees will forgive us our 3 years of neglect as we look forward to many years of peace with our Oliviers and many enjoyable meals cooked with oil produced by them or by their neighbours.
PS you can see some pictures at my other website
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I have just finished picking this years olives (if you must know it wasn't a terribly good year for yield see yesterday's blog entry). Anyway while picking the olives from the nets - a task that is extremely low in direct intellectual stimulation - I started to think about how the olive harvest is a good metaphor for why socialism doesn't work properly in a large scale.
Olives from small producers such as us are put into a common pool at the local olive mill from which we are entitled to the equivalent amount of oil based on the weight of olives we bring in. The mill does a fairly cursory quality check to verify that you are not including leaves and dirt and that the olives are not rotten, but this check is quite superficial and it would be fairly easy to stick in a number of olives that were substandard. In fact almost by definition some substandard ones will be in the mix simply because it is impossible for pickers to check every olive and remove the bad ones. This could lead us to one of the classic problems of socialism: cheating.
We producers are "paid" based on the quantity of the olives, not the quality above an extremely low level. Thus it would be in our interest to produce as many olives as possible regardless of quality. We personally do not suffer from this since the oil we get back is probably not made from our olives but rather those of our neighbours so we risk nothing by cheating and stand to gain a certain amount of oil. In my observation at the mill and in discussions with my neighbours we do not cheat (much) because there is still a feedback mechanism in that if too much cheating goes on then we all lose because our oil will be bad this year and probably worse next year because everyone will start cheating. The following year we will have to pay more to get our olives crushed because the mill will have to institute better quality inspections to raise the standard back to something acceptable. Since the olive quality->olive oil quality link is so clear, even though feedback would be fairly lengthy (it would take a year or two), it is unlikely that any of the few hundred producers will cheat excessively, but the system relies on that honesty to keep down costs.
It is a sad fact that as a system grows the incentive to remain honest is lessened. If one producer out of a total of 20 cheats then this is immediately obvious (and the mill would probably be able to identify who cheated and thus take immediate sanctions) so the incentive to cheat is low. For one in 200 to cheat the risk that you are discovered immediately decreases but still the prospect of suffering next year remains high because your contribution is likely to noticably affect the quality of the batch and so the incentive to cheat remains fairly low, however there is less incentive to make sure that your olives are of the highest quality and so it seems likely that the oil produced will be greater in quantity and lower quality than it might be. For a total number of producers over a couple of thousand the incentive to cheat is extremely high because the effect of a single cheat on the total production quality is negligable thus it becomes well worth it for a producer to attempt to include not just a few borderline olives but as many olives as possible even if the majority are rotten.
So what has this tale got to do with Socialism and Scalability. Well, it is an excellent example of why socialism and other forms of collectivism don't work when scaled up. The incentive to cheat as the size of the pot grows means that more people are likely to cheat and that means that the quality of the input collapses. And then you get the Soviet Union and its exploding TVs. But lest the capitalists feel too smug, this same scalability problem affects many sorts of capitalistic enterprise too. The obvious example is the Joint Stock Corporation and widespread share ownership as we have seen at Enron and the like. The reward for an executive to pump up his companiies stock long enough for him to cash in his options is huge. If the company fails the week after it needn't affect him. Hence Corporate scandals. Corporations work when the shares are closely held - a shareholder with 10% of his equity in one company that he owns 10% of has considerable incentive to make executives reward his long term interests. A shareholder with a 1% stake in a company that he owns 0.1% of has no such incentive.
Engineers are well aware of the problems of scalability. We learn how to design stuff that functions as well with 100 users as 1 million and no matter what the engineering discipline there are warnings - often with graphic pictures - of what happens when things don't scale nicely. Politicians mostly don't seem to grasp this concept, which is why so many things that worked fine in a town or county fail to work at national or international level. The great thing about free-markets is that they scale better than regulated equivalents.
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