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NYT 1619 Project: Slavery Works!
According to the New York Times, slavery not only works but it works amazingly well, which may explain the editorial board’s nostalgia for the Soviet Union and its enthusiasm for bringing socialism’s “benefits” to America.
The Times believes that slavery works so well that it accounted for fully 50% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in the United States prior to the Civil War.
Of course, to reach that 50% number, you’ve got to conflate GDP and GDE (Gross Domestic Expenditure) and indiscriminately plug components of GDE into GDP until you’ve exaggerated slavery’s contribution to the economy by a factor of about ten. If you care, you can read the details here.
People who understand basic economics know that, as Adam Smith observed in The Wealth of Nations, slave labor is far less efficient than is free labor. For some reason, people produce more when they benefit from their production than they do when they’re threatened by the lash.
In addition, slave societies tend to develop an antipathy toward work. Work in such a society is demeaning; something that only slaves do. Unsurprisingly, such societies tend to be quite poor, as the South was both before and after the war.
Published in General
This – this is the central problem with leftism.
It should be more complicated. It’s not.
Soviet workers’ motto: They pretend to pay us, we pretend to work.
National Review posted a very very detailed takedown of this libel on Monday. Well worth the read to understand how this myth originated with pro-slavery apologists in the 1850s, and birthed the lie that somehow the Confederacy’s economy would prove to be key to their victory.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/1619-project-new-york-times-king-cotton-thesis/
If slave output counted for half of the country’s GDP, as the NYT claims, then how can they explain the steady rise in per capita GDP throughout the war years, when half the nation’s productive capacity was lost?
Just to be fair, there were instances in which slave labor was more productive than free labor in terms of cost per output, because slaves could be forced to work harder and produce more per man-hour. After emancipation, free labor demanded wages 2-3x higher to work in “gangs” (which is how plantation owners worked slaves – imagine a moving assembly line underneath a literal whip) than to work in the traditional mode of free labor. Obviously slaves were not paid wages, but room and board is also a cost, and slaves were very expensive. If it was not more productive, it wouldn’t have persisted for so long or even existed at all, because it had to compete with free labor.
But this is not what they are saying. I suspect that people who point out what Magness points out will be accused of various nasty things, like “downplaying the legacy of slavery,” or worse. If they’re exaggerating, then downplaying the exaggeration to bring it back to reality is exactly what should be done, at least for people who care about truth.
I also don’t understand how this error in calculation of GDP is supposed to influence any current political debates. Even if the 50% number was accurate, so what? We already got rid of slavery.
The what is that we need to feel guilty and white and black Americans always have to feel different from each other and vote for lefty democrats. The subtext of all of this is irredeemable guilt.
In grad school, a number of us were trying to understand a class of econometric time series models where the concept of cointegration–the idea that some groups of economic variables move together over time, even though they may move apart in the short run. Time series models are interesting because they tend to produce good forecasts with fairly limited amounts of information (and almost no underlying theory).
Anyway, we studied time series data on whatever we could find, in the days before the interwebs, that took time, and usually required entering the data yourself. I stumbled onto Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman’s Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Slavery. That book contains data from the New Orleans slave market, and led to a couple of earlier works that had data from other slave markets. These were somewhat more interesting data sets than comparing the prices of potatoes, gold, wheat, and lard, or some of the other data sets we found to test. The interesting thing is that there is a long controversy about whether slavery was an efficient way to produce cotton, leading to discussions of whether the peculiar institution would have died out on its own without a civil war. At the time, we were less interested in those aspect than we were the econometric results. But if the prices of slaves and cotton were cointegrated, the results could be interpreted to imply that slavery was an efficient system, and a reminder that efficient doesn’t imply just.
Long story short, the two variables were cointegrated, over time the price of slaves rose and fell with the price of cotton in London. But what was troubling, was that the relationship seemed too good. We didn’t go much farther with this data. It didn’t explain why the price of slaves continued to climb throughout the war, even though it had to be clear that the possibility of losing the investment was a near certainty. Even though the London price of cotton was high, it made little sense to think that high cotton prices resulted in high slave prices, because high London cotton prices were due to the effectiveness of the Union blockade. Sometime later, I found that Foley and Engerman studied hundreds of thousands of bills of sale, but few had any information about the individual except for sex and approximate age. They pointed out that since slavery was not one monolithic enterprise devoted to cotton cultivation, there was no way to know, if the person sold was, for example, an artisan or a field hand. So, they built a model to help them choose which sales included field hands, based on the price of cotton. And that, I believe, invalidates any study that used their data to determine if slavery was efficient. The price of cotton determined the price of slaves, and the slave price was determined based on the price of cotton.
A slave’s productive output is wholly confiscated his only return being basic needs and those on the rudest terms of clothing, food and shelter. So even though his output may be much less than that of a free employee the bottom line could be equal or greater than that portion of an employee who gets a greater percentage of his output. Plus the employee is free to leave whenever a better opportunity presents whereas the slave is not, freeing the owner from the expense and headache of labor replacement to some degree.
I don’t believe that slavery or the semi-slavery of Socialism are really more productive but it’s easy to see why those at the top would be convinced it is so. Plus they could feel themselves superior to those conscripted to serve their needs and desires.
It is the development of machinery that has freed us all from this pernicious and dehumanizing system of production.
One thing Fogel and Engerman were able to show is that the typical slave’s material well being—clothing, health care, etc, were much higher than the typical Irish immigrant. Their conclusion that the reason slavery is wrong isn’t because slave owners were cruel, or slaves were poor, but that they did not have a choice. Something that is completely lost one our new class of socialists who seem more than willing to trade health care for freedom. One of Engerman’s books is titled Without Contract or Consent.
Also recommend the 1619 podcasts that Power Line is doing. They are mostly looking at the legal/historical mistakes of this series but just excellent for getting the facts rather then the NYT’s shameful take on an important subject.
If only I were young again and had not actually been educated so that I could instead be totally ignorant of economics and not just ignorant but pathetically wrong about history and law… I could write for the New York Times!.
Are there no grownups left among NYT readers to point out how sad and debased that paper is? Does anyone even care? Medieval laymen looked to clerics and nobles for guidance which was probably more useful and reality based than the Twitter feed of the average liberal that xhe uses for similar purposes.
Right? This is one the absurd aspects of the 1619 Project (I’ve heard that some of the essays do indeed offer information and perspectives of value). The utility of slavery has been discredited by economists and historians time and again.
And of course capitalism is in opposition to slavery: people who aren’t paid, can’t buy anything.
Please present some evidence for a) work antipathy in the South, pre- or postwar and b) an account of relative regional wealth production in which industrialization doesn’t swamp the bejesus out of agrarian pursuits no matter how lucrative the crop or how it gets picked.
I have heard it argued that the production of cotton in the slave states was so inefficient that Southern businessmen would have made even more money if they’d simply bought the cotton in India.
Slavery is a form of government control and central planning. Of course the NYT believes that it works.
@okiesailor That is a good point. I believe you are refuting the source material I had learned from, and forgotten.
https://www.amazon.com/Poverty-Slavery-Unfree-Pollutes-Economy/dp/3319489674/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1STUJFH7MVDGQ&keywords=poverty+of+slavery&qid=1567436702&s=gateway&sprefix=poverty+of+slavery%2Caps%2C165&sr=8-1#customerReviews
The lie that slavery represented half of the U.S. economy and was essential to our nation’s growth is intended to bolster demands for reparations. But there may be unintended consequences: What is the NYT telling developing countries about the best way to improve there economies? There are an estimated 30 – 40 million slaves in the world today; does the Times really want to encourage the modern slave trade?