2. Economic conditions have changed since the 1830s.
In the United States in the 1830s, almost everyone worked for themselves or their families.
Economic historian Alfred Chandler wrote, “Until the 1840s . . . in farming, lumbering, mining, manufacturing, and construction the enterprise remained small and personal. In nearly all cases it was a family affair.”* For a household to earn an income, it needed property to work with. By far the dominant occupation at the time was farming. Across the whole nation, two-thirds of free males working in 1830 were in agriculture.** Among the Saints coming to Jackson County, Missouri, most were farmers.*** Farmers could not pursue their occupation without land. A few Saints had non-agricultural occupations, including blacksmith, storekeeper, printer, ferry operator, grist mill operator. Zion members who were not farmers also required some property appropriate to their occupation.
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*Alfred D. Chandler, Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in the American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1977), 50.Thomas J. Weiss, “Revised Estimates of the United States Workforce, 1800–1860,” in Stanley L. Engerman and
**Robert E. Gallman, eds., Long-Term Factors in American Economic Growth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 646, 661.
***Joseph A. Geddes, The United Order among the Mormons (Missouri phase), (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1922; repr. University of California Libraries), 160.
Workers who join Zion 21.0 would predominantly be employees.
Today, only about 10 percent of workers in the United States are self-employed. Derived from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Farmers in the 1830s typically sold only a portion of what they produced; the rest was consumed at home.
Richard Bushman called this “composite farming.” See Richard Lyman Bushman, “Markets and Composite Farms in Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 55, no. 3 (Jul., 1998): 351- 374, particularly pp. 364, 370.
People are now used to expressing their annual income in dollar terms.
Because of federal and state tax laws, most employees receive an annual statement of their wage or salary income. Self-employed people are also required to calculate their annual income. Income from many types of investments is also reported. In contrast to the 1830s, less than 2 percent of the workforce is now employed in farming, and only a tiny fraction of agricultural production is retained for use by the farmers who produce it.