Subsistence

The Latin verb subsistere combined sub (under, below) and sistere (to stand or cause to stand).1 The original meaning was to stand firm, to remain, to hold one's ground. In English by the early seventeenth century, subsistence described the means of maintaining life, the minimum required to continue existing.

The economic usage hardened the word. Subsistence farming described agriculture that produced enough to feed a family but generated no surplus for market sale. Subsistence wages described pay that covered survival and nothing more.

David Ricardo formalized the concept in his iron law of wages (1817), arguing that wages would naturally tend toward the level necessary to sustain the worker and permit the perpetuation of the labor supply, without increase or diminution.2

For most of human history, subsistence was the norm, not the exception. The transition from subsistence agriculture to wage labor was neither voluntary nor gradual in many regions. Enclosure movements in England, colonial extraction in Africa and Asia, and forced displacement worldwide pushed populations off land they had farmed for generations.3

A word that in Latin meant to stand firm became, in economics, a description of those who could barely stand at all. Roughly 500 million smallholder farms still feed approximately two billion people worldwide.4