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Paul Leroy Vogt | |
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| Born | May 28, 1878 Upper Sandusky, Ohio, United States |
| Died | Unknown |
| Nationality | American |
| Occupation | Rural Sociologist |
| Years active | 1906–1945 |
Paul Leroy Vogt (born 1878) is an American rural sociologist, empirical researcher, and a founding member of the Rural Sociological Society. During his lengthy career he published numerous papers and books on rural life, economics, and morality.
Vogt was born in Upper Sandusky, Ohio on May 28, 1878. [1] He received his Bachelor of Arts from Ohio Northern University in 1901. [1] He then received his Ph.D. as a Harrison Fellow in Pennsylvania in 1907. [1]
Vogt's career spanned many organizations included academia, government, and religious institutions. Between 1908 and 1909 he was employed as an expert and special agent for the United States Bureau of Labor and Corporations. From 1911 until 1915 he was a professor and head of the Department of Sociology at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. On July 1, 1915 he was hired as a professor and the head of the Department of Rural Economics at Ohio State University until he resigned on January 1, 1917. For the next eight years he was employed as the superintendent of rural work for the Board Home Missions and Church Extension Office of the Methodist Episcopal Church. From 1933 to 1936 he was the regional director at the Workers Educational Bureau of America and from 1936 until 1939 he was the senior agricultural economist for the Agricultural Adjustment Administration at the USDA. [1]
Vogt is often considered one of the founders of Rural Sociology. He attended an annual meeting of the American Sociological Society in 1916 where the theme was rural life. Twelve attendees, including Kenyon Butterfield and Charles Galpin, decided to continue to gather informally on an annual basis. This group eventually founded the Rural Sociological Society. [2] Vogt defined Rural Sociology as "...the study of the forces and conditions of rural life as a basis for constructive action in developing and maintaining a scientifically efficient civilization in the country." [3]
In December 1916 Vogt published The Farmer's Labor Income in The American Economic Review. In it, Vogt empirically compares the income of farmers to that of people living in urban areas. His focus was on the central and upper midwest and he further breaks down the economic conditions of various groups in these regions: absentee landlords, owner-farmers, tenant farmers, and farm laborers. Ultimately, he concludes that labor income of farmers is comparable to those of urban areas; however, an economic trend in favor absentee landlords presents an existential threat to the rural Midwest. This trend was due to the fact that the majority of income increases was coming in the form of land value which only benefited absentee landlords and owner-farmers. This had the further effect of making it more difficult for tenant farmers to become owner-farmers because the land was becoming more expensive, but tenant farmer incomes were stagnant or growing slower. Therefore, the number of tenant farmers was increasing. [4]
In 1916, Vogt published his paper The Land Problem and Rural Welfare in Volume 11 of the Publications of the American Sociological Society. The paper reemphasizes his work in Farmer's Labor Income and restates his position that arresting the economic trends that are mostly benefiting absentee landlords is paramount to a productive and happy rural society. Furthermore, Vogt goes on to explain that the increasing number of tenant farmers has detrimental effects on both the lives of those farmers as well as the quality of the food they produce. Tenant farmer residences were more likely to be heated by a stove, lit by kerosene, not have kitchen sinks, and have water wells that were closer to their outhouse and barn. Additionally, the quality of produce from tenant farms was consistently lower and tenant farms tended to spend less on fertilizer. In order to resolve this issue Vogt advocated for the creation of a tax scheme that encouraged absentee landlords to reduce their holdings in order to increase the number of owner-farmers. [5]
In 1922, Vogt published Introduction to Rural Sociology. The book is one of the first text books ever published in the field and covers topics such as rural life, organizations, attitudes, economics, and institutions. [6]
Agrarianism is a political and social philosophy that has promoted subsistence agriculture, smallholdings, and egalitarianism, with agrarian political parties normally supporting the rights and sustainability of small farmers and poor peasants against the wealthy in society. In highly developed and industrial nations or regions, it can denote use of financial and social incentives for self-sustainability, more community involvement in food production and smart growth that avoids urban sprawl, and also what many of its advocates contend are risks of human overpopulation; when overpopulation occurs, the available resources become too limited for the entire population to survive comfortably or at all in the long term.
Physiocracy is an economic theory developed by a group of 18th-century Age of Enlightenment French economists who believed that the wealth of nations derived solely from the value of "land agriculture" or "land development" and that agricultural products should be highly priced. Their theories originated in France and were most popular during the second half of the 18th century. Physiocracy became one of the first well-developed theories of economics.
The Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) was a United States federal law of the New Deal era designed to boost agricultural prices by reducing surpluses. The government bought livestock for slaughter and paid farmers subsidies not to plant on part of their land. The money for these subsidies was generated through an exclusive tax on companies which processed farm products. The Act created a new agency, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, also called "AAA" (1933-1942), an agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, to oversee the distribution of the subsidies. The Agriculture Marketing Act, which established the Federal Farm Board in 1929, was seen as an important precursor to this act. The AAA, along with other New Deal programs, represented the federal government's first substantial effort to address economic welfare in the United States.
A peasant is a pre-industrial agricultural laborer or a farmer with limited land-ownership, especially one living in the Middle Ages under feudalism and paying rent, tax, fees, or services to a landlord. In Europe, three classes of peasants existed: slave, serf, and free tenant. Peasants might hold title to land either in fee simple or by any of several forms of land tenure, among them socage, quit-rent, leasehold, and copyhold.
In economics, an absentee landlord is a person who owns and rents out a profit-earning property, but does not live within the property's local economic region. The term "absentee ownership" was popularised by economist Thorstein Veblen's 1923 book of the same name, Absentee Ownership. Overall, tax policy seems to favour absentee ownership. However, some jurisdictions seek to extract money from absentee owners by taxing land. Absentee ownership has sometimes put the absentee owners at risk of loss.
A tenant farmer is a person who resides on land owned by a landlord. Tenant farming is an agricultural production system in which landowners contribute their land and often a measure of operating capital and management, while tenant farmers contribute their labor along with at times varying amounts of capital and management. Depending on the contract, tenants can make payments to the owner either of a fixed portion of the product, in cash or in a combination. The rights the tenant has over the land, the form, and measures of payment vary across systems. In some systems, the tenant could be evicted at whim ; in others, the landowner and tenant sign a contract for a fixed number of years. In most developed countries today, at least some restrictions are placed on the rights of landlords to evict tenants under normal circumstances.
Subsistence agriculture occurs when farmers grow food crops to meet the needs of themselves and their families on smallholdings. Subsistence agriculturalists target farm output for survival and for mostly local requirements, with little or no surplus. Planting decisions occur principally with an eye toward what the family will need during the coming year, and only secondarily toward market prices. Tony Waters, a professor of sociology, defines "subsistence peasants" as "people who grow what they eat, build their own houses, and live without regularly making purchases in the marketplace."
Georgism, also called in modern times Geoism, and known historically as the single tax movement, is an economic ideology holding that, although people should own the value they produce themselves, the economic rent derived from land—including from all natural resources, the commons, and urban locations—should belong equally to all members of society. Developed from the writings of American economist and social reformer Henry George, the Georgist paradigm seeks solutions to social and ecological problems, based on principles of land rights and public finance which attempt to integrate economic efficiency with social justice.
The Irish National Land League was an Irish political organisation of the late 19th century which sought to help poor tenant farmers. Its primary aim was to abolish landlordism in Ireland and enable tenant farmers to own the land they worked on. The period of the Land League's agitation is known as the Land War. Historian R. F. Foster argues that in the countryside the Land League "reinforced the politicization of rural Catholic nationalist Ireland, partly by defining that identity against urbanization, landlordism, Englishness and—implicitly—Protestantism." Foster adds that about a third of the activists were Catholic priests, and Archbishop Thomas Croke was one of its most influential champions.
Sharecropping is a legal arrangement with regard to agricultural land in which a landowner allows a tenant to use the land in return for a share of the crops produced on that land.
In real estate, a landed property or landed estate is a property that generates income for the owner without the owner having to do the actual work of the estate.
John Rogers Commons was an American institutional economist, Georgist, progressive and labor historian at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
The Land Acts were a series of measures to deal with the question of tenancy contracts and peasant proprietorship of land in Ireland in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Five such acts were introduced by the government of the United Kingdom between 1870 and 1909. Further acts were introduced by the governments of the Irish Free State after 1922 and more acts were passed for Northern Ireland.
Edward Alsworth Ross was a progressive American sociologist, eugenicist, economist, and major figure of early criminology.
The social structure of China has an extensive history which begins from the feudal society of Imperial China to the contemporary era. There was a Chinese nobility, beginning with the Zhou dynasty. However, after the Song dynasty, the powerful government offices were not hereditary. Instead they were selected through the imperial examination system, of written examinations based on Confucian thought, thereby undermining the power of the hereditary aristocracy.
The Highland Clearances were the forced evictions of a significant number of tenants in the Scottish Highlands and Islands, mostly in two phases from 1750 to 1860.
Thailand witnessed several uprisings by farmers from several central Thai provinces in the mid-1970s. Thailand, transitioning to democratic government after nearly forty years of dictatorship, was beset by revolution involving several segments of the population. Farmers were one of several politicized groups that rioted on the streets. They implored Thai Prime Minister Thanom Kittikachorn to reduce their debt and to ensure fair rice prices.
Sardara Singh Johl is an Indian agriculture economist, writer, politician and the chancellor of the Central University of Punjab. A former National Professor of Agricultural Economics of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, he served as the vice chancellor of the Punjabi University and Punjab Agricultural University during different tenures and chaired the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices set up by the Government of India. He is a former director of the Central Board of Governors of the Reserve Bank of India and a former consultant to international bodies such as Food and Agriculture Organization, World Bank and United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia. The Government of India awarded him the third highest civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan, in 2004, for his contributions to Agriculture and agriculture education.
Concentration of land ownership refers to the ownership of land in a particular area by a small number of people or organizations. It is sometimes defined as additional concentration beyond that which produces optimally efficient land use.
The Black Belt in the American South refers to the social history, especially concerning slavery and black workers, of the geological region known as the Black Belt. The geology emphasizes the highly fertile black soil. Historically, the black belt economy was based on cotton plantations – along with some tobacco plantation areas along the Virginia-North Carolina border. The valuable land was largely controlled by rich whites, and worked by very poor, primarily black slaves who in many counties constituted a majority of the population. Generally the term is applied to a larger region than that defined by its geology.
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