'Emancipation and the move to an economy based on voluntary labor market transactions led to the single greatest annual increase in aggregate economic surplus in American history'
I've long thought slavery was a yoke around the neck of progress, but I don't quite understand this paper from the summary.
1) Slavery was inefficient economically, but it could generate income for a small group of slave masters by exploiting others.
2) These slave masters mostly spent their extra income on useless bullshit that didn't improve society.
3) Slavery imposed huge external costs on society around the slave master (tied into #1). These external costs were part of the cause of the Civil War.
4) The south was largely an economic backwater before and after the war.
5) Only after the introduction of air conditioning, modern medicine & sanitation, and the inefficiency of Northern politics did we get the Renaissance of the Sun Belt, and then mostly because white Northerners moved South.
That the enslaved were better off after emancipation is obvious, but I wouldn't call the South "productive". America would clearly have been better off if slavery never existed and we never imported anyone from Africa.
Guesome?
Imported?
I've long thought slavery was a yoke around the neck of progress, but I don't quite understand this paper from the summary.
1) Slavery was inefficient economically, but it could generate income for a small group of slave masters by exploiting others.
2) These slave masters mostly spent their extra income on useless bullshit that didn't improve society.
3) Slavery imposed huge external costs on society around the slave master (tied into #1). These external costs were part of the cause of the Civil War.
4) The south was largely an economic backwater before and after the war.
5) Only after the introduction of air conditioning, modern medicine & sanitation, and the inefficiency of Northern politics did we get the Renaissance of the Sun Belt, and then mostly because white Northerners moved South.
That the enslaved were better off after emancipation is obvious, but I wouldn't call the South "productive". America would clearly have been better off if slavery never existed and we never imported anyone from Africa.