Chapter 1517: Settlement of Accounts

Su You asked: "Your Majesty, do you know how many people there are in the Song Dynasty now?"

Zhao Xu said: "Li Changjin from the Ministry of Revenue reported that our Song Dynasty now has 150 million...I can't remember the details, but it's more than 150 million in total!"

Su Youyou asked: "Does Your Majesty know the total area of ​​cultivated land in the Song Dynasty?"

Zhao Xu said: "Before Qingli, there were more than four million hectares. After Qingli, it was reduced to more than two million hectares. Xining recovered to four million hectares. After Yuanfeng, it increased every year. Now it has more than eight million hectares!"

Su You smiled and said: "Your Majesty is brave and wise. He is not yet very young, but he knows all the important national events and big figures. I would like to congratulate your Majesty."

Zhao Xu said: "Where is Situ's question?"

Su You said: "Don't be busy, the conditions have not been set yet... Your Majesty, how are the households below the fifth rank divided?"

Zhao Xu thought for a moment: "I'm really not sure about this, but before Cai Jing left the Kaifeng Mansion, he made a memorial, begging for the three-way security in the Mansion boundary, and only those who are sick in Liang Ding's family will keep an eye on those with less than twenty acres of land, listen.

Present yourself, be examined by the prosecutor and released."

"In my opinion, this average of one ten acres should be what Situ often calls the 'poverty line'. A fifth-class household should get one ten acres, right?"

Su You praised: "Yes, Your Majesty is really smart. Now you can do the math. There are 15000 people in the Song Dynasty. Even if half are men and half are women, on average, how many acres of land does one person actually own?"

?”

"That's 8.5 million divided by 75 million. Oh, no, it needs to be multiplied by 100! I'll go figure it out, Situ!"

After a while, Zhao Xu came over. Although he calculated the answer correctly, his expression was not happy at all: "How is it possible! In the Song Dynasty, the average person in the Song Dynasty has only 11 acres of land! Isn't this the whole world below the fifth-class household?!"

Su You smiled: "Don't worry, Your Majesty. Let's do the calculation again. This time we won't calculate it based on the number of people and acres. We will calculate it based on the grain output."

"We roughly calculate based on the average household of five people, two men, two women, and one child. We calculate it as two kilograms for men, one kilogram for women, and half a kilogram for children. Let's calculate it as seven kilograms per day. On average, one person needs more per day.

One and a half pounds of grain is enough for food and clothing."

"Then in one year of the Song Dynasty, how much food would we need to feed and clothe the entire population?"

Zhao Xu quickly calculated: "More than 82.1 billion kilograms of grain are needed!"

Su You sighed secretly in his heart. Your child's math skills are much better than your father's: "Let's calculate based on the average grain yield of two hundred kilograms per mu in the Song Dynasty. How much land is needed to grow so much grain?"

Zhao Xu calculated again: "Huh? That's not right. It requires more than 400 million acres and more than 4 million hectares of land. Situ, only four million hectares of land is enough, but our Song Dynasty already has eight million hectares of land.

ah!"

Su You smiled: "Your Majesty, farmers not only need to cultivate the land, they also need to build houses, wear clothes, grow vegetables, raise chickens, ducks, cattle and sheep, pay various taxes, and perform various labor services.

"

"And not all of the population in our dynasty are farmers. There are scholars, farmers, industry and commerce from all walks of life."

"Actually, the agricultural population accounts for only 70% of the Ding population in our country. Therefore, among the 75 million Ding population, there are almost 50 million farmers."

"The average household per year creates the wealth of today's twenty acres of grain production, which can only be regarded as poverty. Calculated based on this figure, it can be said that before the Song Dynasty and Yuanfeng, and even from Xia, Shang and Zhou to Yuanfeng, the Chinese people were struggling most of the time.

Near this line."

"This line is the bottom line, and I call it the 'survival line.'"

"Nowadays, the per capita land occupied by peasants in our dynasty has increased from less than 20 acres during the Qingli period to about 80 acres. This is your father, the late emperor, leading the ministers and people in more than 20 acres.

What a great achievement this year!”

Zhao Xu's expression was immediately filled with admiration, and his eyes were full of little stars.

"The 50 million farmers of the Song Dynasty used eight million hectares of land to feed a total of 150 million people. This is the truth. We dare to say that this data is enough to prove that the Song Dynasty today is the most prosperous in history.

dynasty!"

Zhao Xu was a little confused: "Then Situ just said that my Song Dynasty is not the best?"

"Of course it's not the best yet." Su You continued to persuade: "Because the Song Dynasty still had a huge foreign enemy, the Liao Kingdom. There are still many problems within our dynasty."

"what is the problem?"

"It's a lot... Let's take land as an example. We just calculated the average, but the actual situation is that some areas in the Song Dynasty, such as Shuzhong, Liangzhe and Bianjing, have more people and less land, while the rest of the areas have more people and less land.

Such as Hebei, Shaanxi, Jinghu, and Ningxia, but they are vast and sparsely populated."

"Among them, the Ningxia Hetao has 900,000 hectares of cultivated land, but the number of people? Only a few hundred thousand."

"In addition to the inequality caused by geography, there is also the inequality caused by the system."

"The standard for a first-class household in the Song Dynasty is one hectare of land or more, and among these households, there are as many as three hundred or five hundred hectares."

"The country needs to rely on tax revenue to operate, but unfortunately, the second, third, and fourth class households that pay taxes for the Song Dynasty are the main ones."

"And among the first-class households, many are tax-exempt clan members, nobles, and important ministers."

“This is the ‘inverted tax system’ problem raised by Zhang Dun.”

"Also, there are floods and droughts that often occur in the land of China, as well as the unruly Yellow River."

"Therefore, the work done by the late emperor laid the foundation for the Song Dynasty to get rid of the survival line, get rid of the food and clothing line, and enter the basic prosperity line. It was a very solid foundation."

"But how to make this foundation benefit the whole world, make the people of the Song Dynasty live better, and make the country more secure, stable and prosperous? Your Majesty, this is your future task, which is as difficult and important as the late emperor's task

, equally glorious.”

Zhao Xu was so excited that his face turned red: "If it weren't for Situ's advice, I wouldn't have known that my father's achievements were so great! Don't worry, Situ, I will work hard and never fall into the trap of my late father!"

During daily court meetings, Zhao Xu often heard ministers say that his father was wise, wise, and powerful, but no one ever told him where his father was wise, wise, and mighty by calculating detailed accounts with him.

If you acquire a lot of territory, people can say you are wasting people and money; if you increase the national treasury, people can say you have exhausted people's resources; especially the recent heated discussion about the new law has even made Zhao Xu a little confused.

Even Zhao Xu felt confused, so it is completely understandable that no one mourned Wang Anshi.

Today's detailed account has completely broken through these fogs. Su You did not base the story on Zhao Xu's great achievements, but on this incident, Zhao Xu saw that since Yuanfeng, the country's conflicts have eased, national power has grown, and people's lives have improved.

the root cause.

The slow growth of the agricultural population and the massive growth of agricultural land have brought about the easing of land conflicts in farming countries, while the increase in output and the promotion of intensive farming have improved the "per capita wealth creation efficiency" proposed by Wang Anshi.

This is a method that Wang Anshi strongly praised and promoted in "Economic Theory", believing that this method can greatly improve the "labor efficiency" of small family landowners, reduce survival risks, and enable them to accumulate a certain amount of wealth.

But conversely, this method cannot be realized by large landowners, so it can fundamentally suppress the intensity of mergers.

But what Wang Anshi overlooked is that if large producers have effective machinery, their labor efficiency will also increase and their accumulation will be faster. Therefore, the soil for mergers has not completely disappeared.

But before the advent of large-scale machinery, there was nothing wrong with Wang Anshi's argument. There was no slave class in the Song Dynasty. To hire workers, you had to pay a cost. The function of the government was to prevent this cost from being reduced to the point of cruel oppression and exploitation.

As for national use, not to mention industry and commerce, as long as the agricultural tax on the eight million hectares of land can be collected normally, the country will not worry about running out of money.

The fact that later generations of the Qing Dynasty were able to afford so many indemnities was the basis of the system of "officials and gentry all paying for themselves".

There was a knock on the door, and Bing Guan came in: "Your Majesty, father, Zhongmou has arrived."

Chen Wu walked in: "Chen Wu has met His Majesty and has seen the sacrificial wine."

Su You is now the president of the Capital University. Chen Wu, from an academic point of view, said that there is nothing wrong with Su You offering wine.
Chapter completed!