Kicking off America's Black History Month (with an extra day this year but still the shortest month on the calendar).
From the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business' Chicago Booth Review, December 19, 2023:
For at least the past half century, most economists have viewed the history of slavery in the United States as morally abhorrent but economically advantageous. The argument has run that allocating work to forced laborers was productive, yielding tremendous wealth even if the wrong people received that wealth. Emancipation, correspondingly, has been seen as economically damaging. For example, several studies estimate that southern agricultural output fell by one-third from 1860 to 1880, a period of time during which slavery ended in the US.
But this perspective overlooks the costs imposed upon the people who were enslaved, and the implications for aggregate economic performance when centering those costs in the analysis. Chicago Booth’s Richard Hornbeck and the Ohio State University’s Trevon D. Logan performed a reaccounting and conclude that slavery was highly inefficient.
The researchers contend that emancipation generated aggregate economic gains for the US economy that were worth between 4 and 35 percent of US GDP, making it, even at the low end of their estimation, one of the most important economic events in US history—bigger than the introduction of railroads, by some estimates, and worth 7 to 60 years of technological innovation in the latter half of the 19th century. That boost came from reducing the substantial costs imposed by slavery, even though the result was significantly lower output in former slave states. Calculations of other economic events include costs, they point out: for example, technological innovation generates aggregate gains not only by increasing output, but by increasing output beyond any accompanying increases in input costs.
To get a more complete picture of the economics of slavery, the researchers first considered the amount paid to emancipated people to continue to do gang labor—a system used under slavery for agricultural production, particularly in cotton—for one year. This figure, which they estimated to be $100, was still generally insufficient for emancipated people to voluntarily work under the physically intense gang labor system. But this amount was substantially more than the average annual value that slaves produced for their slaveowners ($60, by their calculations), thus the researchers conclude that slavery cost the aggregate economy at least $40 per year for each enslaved person. Multiplying $40 by 4 million, the number of people held captive in the US, produced an aggregate gain from emancipation equivalent to about 4 percent of total GDP in 1860....
....MUCH MORE
Keeping in mind that, as noted in a very different context: "Converting money values over time is one of the most difficult tasks facing the historian." This CBR analysis passes the first subjective screen, the "does it feel right intuitively?"
We usually make the money-value-over-time point in reference to long price series of agricultural commodities though we have included the subjective as well. From "Yeah But What Does That Have To Do With The Price Of Beer In Krakow?":
....Clicking through the Krakow--and the other cities too but we're using Krakow as our example--data, beyond the oats and beef we find that in 1373 folks were paying 17 grams of silver per litre of beer, which price inflated to 53.4 grams per in 1652 and collapsed to 0.008 grams/L by 1844, also known as "The happy time".
Someone should tell the Libyans and other present-day slavers that, disregarding the economics, slavery is wrong. Where oh where is Samantha Power with all her Humanitarian Intervention and "responsibility to protect" talk? (she was also one of the three advisors in the Obama Administration who pushed for the regime change in Libya that led to the current situation.)
