https://archive.ph/r7jGc

This is fantastic!

I would greatly appreciate an optional light mode / non-dark mode. I know a lot of folks love dark mode, but I find it very hard to read.

Thanks so much for this!

Sure, but the article is talking about people who can and do read code now but will develop software without reading code in the future. Kind of like you rarely look at the object code that the compiler produces.

It seems to be archived on the wayback machine, for example https://web.archive.org/web/20260203163430/https://www.cia.g...

It was available for online browsing or as a downloadable file, I think a zip compressed PDF. I’m sure copies are available, but it would be nice to have an authoritative source.

Bret Devereaux, an historian blogger, has a long, detailed look at the economics of premodern peasant farmers and their households, called Life, Work, Death and the Peasant, starting at https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...

It begins:

“This is the first post in a series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) discussing the basic contours of life – birth, marriage, labor, subsistence, death – of pre-modern peasants and their families. Prior to the industrial revolution, peasant farmers of varying types made up the overwhelming majority of people in settled societies (the sort with cities and writing). And when I say overwhelming, I mean overwhelming: we generally estimate these societies to have consisted of upwards of 80% peasant farmers, often as high as 90 or even 95%. Yet when we talk about these periods, we are often focused on aristocrats, priests, knights, warriors, kings and literate bureaucrats, the sort of folks who write to us or on smiths, masons and artists, the sort of folk whose work sometimes survives for us to see. But this series is going to be about what life was like for the great majority of people who lived in small farming households.”