In the context of the industrial revolution, it is easy to imagine that intensification leads to a rise in labor productivity. There is a counter thesis that has been widely applied to what can be called traditional (or nonindustrial) agriculture. Now primarily associated with the economist Ester Boserup, this position holds that labor productivity falls with the intensification of agriculture. The empirical examples have come from contemporary “traditional” agricultures. Boserup published The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure in 1965. The book presents a model, and the major innovation was her assumption that population growth might drive technological change in agriculture, rather than the reverse. The population as the cause position is not addressed in this chapter, but rather her conclusion that The decline thesis has had a major impact on at least some anthropologists, but if true, it presents a puzzle. From the beginning of urbanism, the division of labor has increased, the proportion of households involved in agriculture has declined, and changes in agricultural technology have improved land productivity. If the productivity of agricultural labor is declining with intensification, how do a lower proportion of farmers, with no improvement of labor productivity, produce ever larger agricultural surpluses? This decline thesis thus contains a dilemma, which has not
been addressed in the literature.