The Amish Are Different from You and Me

Yesterday, the better half and I made a quick trip out to Amish country (Middlefield Twp in Geauga County) to buy some Amish furniture. We're both big fans of Amish furniture especially Mission-style in a light oak finish (living room) and rustic cherry finish (dining room).

The Amish are a puzzle, though. They have businesses, chiefly for outsiders, that have electricity, even air conditioning (which was necessary yesterday), and phones, even cell phones on some construction sites. Amish work in factories, on construction jobs. They use computers at work.

But then they go home to homes without modern conveniences, and a real horse-and-buggy existence.

My query is why is it OK to use modern conveniences at work, but not at home? That seems like a rather convenient compromise with modernity--it's OK to use "electric" to make money, but not for lighting your house or running a washing machine or dryer? (There's always clothes drying on the line somewhere in Amish country.)

The better half also wondered about Amish economics (see, she is smarter than me). She points out that it can't be economically viable for an Amish farmer to plow his fields with a team of horses, when everyone else is doing it with a diesel tractor; or that it can't be viable to thresh your hay (or whatever it's called) with a horse, when other farmers are using a machine hat bales the hay for you. We speculated that the Amish must do farm business with each other (?). But in Middlefield Twp, they're not isolated in any obvious way. I'm sure that they're not that interested in profit, but how do they sustain themselves?