Sunday, May 22, 2011

What are the disadvantages of industrialization?

The major disadvantages of industrialization was the change in farming methods, culture of the farm town,  and potential industrial collapse when the community has a single industry.


Thanks to industrialization, farmers left the fields in favor of a steady pay check.  This gave rise to bigger farms which required newer technology to grow product faster and be able to weed easier.  Thus, the hybrid seeds that have less nutritional value and pesticides which destroyed things other than weeds, like birds.


The culture of the farm town also went away.  Farm towns were places where communities of people came together to help each other out in hard times.  The towns were small, the schools were small and children had a harder time slipping through the cracks because everybody knew everybody else.  One could argue that this was not always a good thing.


Then there is the problem when the factory closes, creating too many families where the bread winner no longer had a pay check.  Think about the steel towns in Pennsylvania or the iron mines in Northern Minnesota, or more recently, the Motor City of Detroit without the car industry.  Without a back up industry, families move; often leaving their now worthless home behind, creating ghost towns and micro depressions within those areas.


There were many advantages to industrialization, and one shouldn't minimize them, but it did change many things for the worse.

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