Security is not incidental to the overall productivity of an agricultural economy, and in wartime the security of crops is certainly not incidental to the farm’s productivity. When war is common the extra work needed to harvest potatoes is a feature, not a bug. This was especially true when, as in most of history, agriculture was the main source of wealth. See also Victor Davis Hanson’s book on the security of crops in ancient Greece.

To think about or model this properly, one has to drop the typical economic assumption of voluntary transactions.

anyone know more on the subject? I’ve been inundated with rhetoric from both sides.

It could be (i have no idea) that the potato story follows a similar mechanism. Groups with interests in cereal may have kept potatoes from taking off. I do not know how much I believe this explanation, but it is not impossible.

I mean, we have, in fact, changed our ways over time; I recently visited Canberra and saw the traces of an Aboriginal culture that hadn’t gotten to the level of the bow and arrow in 30,000 years, though they had quite nicely carved stone axes. That was what impressed on me the counterintuitiveness of the idea that you could progress by inventing new things.

But in our own time, there are plenty of clever innovations that are taking ridiculous amounts of time to catch on. The Shangri-La Diet comes to mind (it works two-thirds of the time, apparently, and there are plenty of people desperate to lose weight). I can think of other examples, but that’s one of the clearer-cut ones with an individual benefit – schooling innovations benefit only mere children rather than the parents who choose them, cryonics requires deductive thought to verify, etcetera.