Economics and the Environment, 8th Edition

CHAPTER 19Poverty, Population, and the Environment

19.0 Introduction

In John Steinbeck’s famous book The Grapes of Wrath, the main character, Tom Joad, returns to the family farm in Oklahoma during the dust bowl of the early 1930s to find his family evicted by the local land company and their house abandoned. He asks his now-crazy neighbor, Muley, “What’s the idear of kickin’ folks off?” Muley replies:

You know what kinda years we been havin’. Dust coming up and spoilin’ ever’thing so a man didn’t get enough crop to plug up an ant’s ass…. An’ the folks that owns the lan’ says, “We can’t afford to keep no tenants.” An’ they says, “The share a tenant gets is just the margin a profit we can’t afford to lose.” An’ they says, “If we put all our land in one piece we can jus’ hardly make her pay.” So they tractored all the tenants off the lan’.¹

Joad’s family hits the road for California, the promised land, only to arrive midwinter with thousands of others, finding “no kinda work for three months,” misery, and starvation. In the final scene of the book, one of the women, whose baby has just been born dead from malnourishment, breast feeds a starving 50-year-old man.

Joad’s story illustrates the process of economic development in a nutshell. The United States in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s saw a transition from small-scale, labor-intensive farming to highly mechanized, chemical-intensive, large-scale agriculture. In the process, with particular force during the great depression and ...