Talk:Concentration of land ownership

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A fact from Concentration of land ownership appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 13 December 2019 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that concentration of land ownership has been linked to deforestation in 48 developing countries?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2019/December. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Concentration of land ownership.

Wikipedia

The following is an archived discussion of the DYK nomination of the article below. Please do not modify this page. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as this nomination's talk page, the article's talk page or Wikipedia talk:Did you know), unless there is consensus to re-open the discussion at this page. No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was: promoted by Yoninah (talk) 22:41, 4 December 2019 (UTC)[reply]

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Comment or view
Article history

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... that concentration of land ownership has been linked to deforestation? Source: "Larger inequality in income and land distribution has been associated to higher deforestation rates in 48 developing countries" Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- ALT1:... that concentration of land ownership tends to make farms less productive? "the usual economies of scale found in industry do not obtain in agriculture. That is, small farms are usually more productive than larger ones" International Sociological Association p. 6
- ALT2: ~~... that Winston Churchill said that concentration of land ownership is "the mother of all other forms of monopoly"? "Churchill's Land-For-The-People Speech"~~

Reviewed: Hanna Kosonen
Comment: Username changed

Created by Fiamh (talk). Self-nominated at 10:56, 19 October 2019 (UTC).[reply]

"Drive-by" comment(s): clearly a topic of overwhelming significance; also perhaps somewhat political with studies likely highly motivated to deliver outcomes in line with views and objectives of participants; apparently per Wikipedia:Did you know/Supplementary guidelines D7 there is an expectation of a reasonable degree of completeness. With such a topic, we are not there yet. Any approval would thus have to be IAR-based, say to align with the DYK objective of attracting new editors to a particular article; ALT2 is least problematic on these grounds. Latifundia and Equal-field system may be relevant. If, per the article, excess land fragmentation may likewise have negative outcomes (cf the Spartans with partitive heredity rather than primogeniture per Oliva etc), also need to be wary of tautology re optimum land parcel size, which is how much by the way? Maculosae tegmine lyncis (talk) 06:18, 27 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

What is "complete?" We don't, and shouldn't, require DYK articles to meet GA standards. I'm not sure why you object to the original hook. It's a correlation, in both cases based on publicly available data. The article might seem unbalanced but I was just not able to find much of anything arguing that land concentration is good; it's criticized from the left to the right. Fiamh ^{(talk, contribs)} 10:05, 27 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

per Gardini 2012 (sorry, link blocked when I tried to post), access to land in southwestern Togo (one of the countries in the footnoted study used in the first link above) may not solely follow the not necessarily applicable dichotomy between communal and individual "ownership", and local land transactions can take place that aren't necessarily reflected on high in cadastral records maintained by central bureaucracies; I wonder how that was adjusted for in the authors' sums; perhaps there could be more granularity when comparing Trinidad with Brazil? apparently the US has a high landgini, if that's the thing to rub; over and out, Maculosae tegmine lyncis (talk) 12:58, 27 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Maculosae tegmine lyncis, I assume you mean "Land Transactions and Chieftaincies in Southwestern Togo"? Land tenure is often complicated and records are not always complete. But we're not the ones who are qualified to weigh these nuances (would require a mountain of OR); the academics who did the study are better placed to do that.

The Hoover institute fellow was discussing the land ownership system in the nineteenth century, not today. As noted in the article, land concentration can change dramatically over time—in either direction—and there's no more frontier to hand out to homesteaders. Fiamh ^{(talk, contribs)} 19:01, 27 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Fiamh: Have there been updates to this nomination? The last comment was over a week ago. Narutolovehinata5 ^tccsdnew 03:12, 5 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
- Narutolovehinata5, no updates, no one has reviewed it yet. Fiamh ^{(talk, contribs)} 03:14, 5 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Full review needed. BlueMoonset (talk) 15:46, 5 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Article is new, long enough, has no copyvio. QPQ satisfied. Well sourced. However, it does have problems with neutrality. From the second paragraph onwards, it talks about the problems with concentration, and concludes with that damning quote by Churchill. The exception is a short description of geographic patterns of concentration. A neutral article would probably start with the geographical information and then describe how concentration arises. After that would be a discussion of the social and economic consequences. Also, the Churchill quote should go (although it might have a place in a more comprehensive article).

This may sound like a lot, but I think that a little rearrangement and a paragraph on how concentration arises would be good enough. Ideally, there would be section headings and a lead that summarizes the content, but the DYK rules don't require that. I think the neutrality issue needs to be addressed before I look at the hooks. RockMagnetist(talk) 17:40, 25 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

RockMagnetist, removed Churchill quote and reorganized/expanded article as suggested. First paragraph discusses where land concentration exists, second paragraph how it arises and is dissipated, and the rest of the article on effects. I don't want to create false balance by inserting positives when the vast majority of sources are negative on it.b uidhe 21:07, 25 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Great, this looks pretty close to ready. It's well researched and well written; I'm impressed by the meticulous citations. I do have a couple of verifiability issues, though:

"If people see ... poor." The citations don't directly support this statement. Barraclough argues that land reform is needed, but does not mention any demands for it. Borras discusses one country where peasant revolts has "widespread lack of control over land" as the underlying cause, but doesn't say what they actually demanded. Also, this sentence seems out of place, coming before any discussion of the consequences of land concentration.
"United States, Venezuela, Paraguay, South Africa, and Namibia". Moyo discusses Africa as a whole and does not mention the US or South America.

The hooks are interesting and the facts check out, but the language is too academic for a good hook. I have reworded the first hook to make it more "hooky". RockMagnetist(talk) 17:49, 26 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

RockMagnetist, I'm fine with your edit to the hook.

Removed.
The sentence in Moyo reads: "The extremely high landholding concentration values of South Africa and Namibia are thus considerably higher than the world’s average Gini coefficient concentration of land(see UNDP, 2012). This level is only surpassed by the land Gini values of Brasil (0.85); USA (0.75); Venezuala (0.92); Paraguay (0.78)." How does that not support the claim in the article? b uidhe 18:35, 26 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

@Buidhe: Are you the same person as Fiamh? The quote you give above is not on page 19, at least in the version I'm looking at. Unfortunately, I don't have access to anything after page 29. RockMagnetist(talk) 18:49, 26 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

RockMagnetist, Yes, I am the same person as Fiamh. The version I'm looking at is the PDF linked in "sources" section for Moyo 2014 (this one). b uidhe 18:52, 26 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

O.k., you're good to go. Both hooks are approved, but I recommend the first one. Nice work! RockMagnetist(talk) 18:58, 26 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, I came by to promote ALT0, but the article only mentions "surging literacy", nothing about illiteracy. Also, some subheads would make it easier to read. Yoninah (talk) 22:23, 28 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yoninah, Added subheadings. Here's an alternate hook that may be better: b uidhe 04:20, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

ALT3: "... that some economists believe that concentration of land ownership was a factor in the Great Divergence between Western countries and the rest of the world?" Source: "As the demand for human capital emerged, differences in the concentration of landownership across countries generated variations in the extensiveness of human-capital formation and therefore in the rapidity of technological progress and the timing of the demographic transition, contributing to the emergence of the great divergence in income per capita across countries." Oded Galor et al., 2009

Thanks, the article and the new hook look much better. @RockMagnetist: could you review ALT3 please? Yoninah (talk) 11:54, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I'm glad that there are now section headings and the info on the Great Divergence is an important addition to the article. However, ALT3 is unacceptable. Neither the hook nor the quote say what effect concentration had. Did it contribute to progress or hinder it? The original hook is easily fixed - just take out "illiteracy". I have also shortened ALT1 to make it hookier. RockMagnetist(talk) 17:26, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

The first hook and ALT1 are both acceptable. RockMagnetist(talk) 17:26, 29 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Removed from article per DYK review

In 1909, future Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Winston Churchill stated that "Land monopoly is not the only monopoly, but it is by far the greatest of monopolies -- it is a perpetual monopoly, and it is the mother of all other forms of monopoly. Unearned increments in land are not the only form of unearned or undeserved profit, but they are the principal form of unearned increment, and they are derived from processes which are not merely not beneficial, but positively detrimental to the general public."^[1]

References

^ Post, Post & Cooley 1909, p. 762.

Post, Louis Freeland; Post, Alice Thacher; Cooley, Stoughton (1909). "Churchill's Land-For-The-People Speech". The Public: A Journal of Democracy. 12. Public Publishing Company: 762–764. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)

"per DYK review"

I'm sorry, but what does that mean? Also I notice there are no links connecting this to any discussion or review. I'm tempted to put the quote back just because I'm uncomfortable with this strange way of deleting it.alacarte (talk) 21:47, 6 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Professor alacarte, Please see the discussion here, specifically the first comment by RockMagnetist. b uidhe 23:15, 6 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I have transcluded the Did You Know? review for convenient reference. RockMagnetist(talk) 23:18, 6 January 2020 (UTC)[reply]

A quibble

The separation of footnotes from sources is pretty, but makes the citations a little harder to use. It makes sense when various pages in the same document are cited, but if a source is only cited once, it would be better to have the source in References. That way, hovering a mouse over the footnote will show the actual reference and not just a link to it, saving time. That's just my opinion and not part of the DYK review. RockMagnetist(talk) 17:21, 26 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

[FOOTNOTEPostPostCooley1909762-1] Post, Post & Cooley 1909, p. 762.

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