Two Recession Benefits: Fewer Lawyers, More Farmland

Two wholly unexpected economic developments suggest that the Great Recession may have a silver lining. How does an America with more farmland and fewer lawyers sound? Apparently, hard times are helping to bring about both. Regarding the farmland, thousands of acres that had been purchased by speculators for residential development have fallen so steeply in price that farmers are snapping up the parcels for agricultural use. In many cases, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal, the growers are paying distress prices for land that had been bid into the ionosphere by speculators as recently as five years ago, just before the Great Recession began. To take a dramatic example, a Phoenix-area dairy farmer recently paid $8 million for a 760-acre alfalfa and cotton field that had been sold to a developer in 2005 for $40.8 million, according to the Journal. “Everything in this area is coming back into farmer’s hands,” said the buyer, one of four brothers. That’s the kind of news that could help take the sting out of high grocery prices, especially since a resurgence of family farming in the U.S. promises to reduce those prices over time. For now, though, because strong crop prices are helping to drive this healthy trend, we should perhaps keep the long-term benefits in mind when we watch the register tape unspool at the checkout counter.

As for the lawyers, the schools that train and graduate them are coming under heavy pressure from Congress to divulge data related to job placement and student-loan debt. The suspicion grows that the nation’s law-degree factories are using bogus numbers to lure students, acccording to the Journal. Moreover, they reportedly have encouraged the students to take out federally-backed loans that are becoming increasingly difficult to repay in a chronically sluggish economy. This will not be news to those of you who have heard stories suggesting that passing the bar exam is no longer an easy ticket to a career as an attorney. This was becoming a fact of life even before the Great Recession began, but students were able to delude themselves into believing a law degree would somehow prove useful no matter what profession they chose. These days, however, with the gap between available jobs and jobs requiring specific legal knowledge widening, it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify the time, expense and effort required to secure a law degree. Our own anecdote involves the son of a close friend who graduated from a top law school in 2006. He recently got a job with a small firm in Philadelphia, but only after he’d paid his dues for nearly five years, working as a translator/clerk in a Chinese-owned hardware store for two years, among other jobs, and, finally, using a family connection to ensure that his curriculum vitae made it to the top of the pile.