If your neighbor is mining the soil and producing really cheap food as a result, you have to do the same or quit. And people are not as flexible about changing their way of life as economics might assume. You don't just quit one job and take up another, it is frightening, you are going into the unknown. You stay with the demons you know, you go on farming, fishing, cutting wood until you are absolutely forced to stop. The whole thing is insane.
People only SEE the flows.
There is nothing linear about it.