Friedrich Neuser
speaker
57 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Friedrich Neuser’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Before we get started, this episode includes some swearing, once in English, but some in the German dialect called Franconian.
Today is a day that Friedrich Neuser has been waiting for for the past 10 years. Good morning. How are you doing, Friedrich? Good morning.
Yes.
I'm Erica.
Friedrich loves a joke and is relentlessly positive. He's this tall, lanky potato farmer in his 60s.
But after today, the plots he's farmed and cared for will no longer be his. He'll trade them in for new plots. Through a lottery, a land lottery.
So at today's lottery, the map of all this land is going to be wiped clean. Friedrich and all the farmers here, their economic fates will be decided by pulling names out of a bag.
Friedrich is talking about Fortuna, the Roman goddess of fortune. And he hopes today she helps him out.
I think it's beginning. The master of ceremonies steps to the microphone for the start of the Ossing Verlosung. That translates to the Ossing Land Lottery. He says, the Ossing Land Lottery greets you, dear guests. Friedrich is starting to look kind of nervous.
Yeah, I see you. Everybody looks a little happy, but also a little nervous right now. Friedrich says his adrenaline is going up, up, up. As he says this, his hand goes up like a roller coaster climbing. I raise my microphone as if I'm making a toast. All right. Let there be good land. For good land. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Erika Barris.
Today on the show, we follow along as every farmer has a shot at the perfect piece of land. or the absolute worst piece of land. And we see what we can learn from this living medieval tradition that tries to balance fairness and efficiency. So, why does OSING have this unusual lottery system? Well, we asked a bunch of people and they all said we need to talk to George Rudolph.
The story begins a thousand years ago. When an empress, Empress Kunikunde, was on a hunting trip here in this area, she got lost.
So, Empress Gunekunde was lost in the woods and she couldn't find her way out. Until she heard bells from the churches coming from the communities at the corners of the forest.
She found her way out and she was so grateful. She gifted the forest land to the people of these four villages. And that forest land became the Olsing. It became the Olsing farmland.
Because the four villages had to share that farmland. Now, communal farmland, it was not such a novel idea, especially around this time in Europe. Lots of places communally farmed land. But what the people of the Osing did next was kind of novel.
He's from this area and he knows this story well. And he says, you see, the people here fought over the lands with the better soil. They fought over how much land they were getting.
So it was just squabbling. Your land is better than my land.
So this is why in the 1500s, the villages came up with a novel system to distribute the land. Elsewhere in Europe, communities were turning communal land into plots people owned individually. Here in the Ossingtho, they came up with their own version of land ownership.
So the villages created the land lottery. Basically, the Olsing would be divided among the people of the four villages. The farmers would randomly be assigned plots. The good ones, the bad ones. Now, some people would be luckier than others. That happens. So there's another part of the lottery. You only got to keep your land for 10 years.
It actually belongs to everybody.
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