This book argues America became rich thanks to slavery contrary to what free market advocates like to believe.
Is it true?
America and slavery
This book argues America became rich thanks to slavery contrary to what free market advocates like to believe.
Is it true?
Ah yes, they became rich because Bantus picked a plant that accounted for 3% of GDP at its height.
>Ah yes, they became rich because Bantus picked a plant that accounted for 3% of GDP at its height.
Pretty sure cotton surpassed 30% by the 1850s. That's the peak of course, but still.
Total sums invested in industrialization by slave traders never amounted to more than 1%. And this is bearing in mind that all industrialization was facilitated by European innovations in property rights, common law, and even in farming practices - innovations in cotton production were largely driven by artificial selection creating more bountiful and hardier varieties of the plant. If blacks were so important, productivity would have improved regardless, and they would have been using African-developed legal systems and scientific hypotheses.
But they didn’t, for a reason.
That's complete nonsense. Comon law is an american thing, to begin with.
If there was any breeding that helped, it was to allow the use of cotton gin. The effects of artifical selection are greatly exagerrated, it's near impossible to improve mechanisms that evolved for millenia under human cultivation and millions of years before that.
>makes a claim about GDP
>pivots to "sums invested in industrialization by slave traders"
That's nice and all but you act like labor had no role here.
They were slaves that were owned and payed for, performing menial labour for those that created value through the organization of distribution and production.
It's not menial labor lol.
They performed the function of menial labour within the market for labour, regardless of what or anyone else thinks. They were private property used in production, whites don’t owe them anything. They owe whites for dragging them kicking and screaming out of Sub-Saharan ignorance and poverty, and into modernity.
You might as well say nobody except kings and their lords produced anything lol
The South was not even 10% of the American economy and slavery was not even 50% of Virginia’s economy.
America was built by Northern miners and steel mills. Southern elites getting wealthy on exporting bacci and cotton is not building an economy if anything it held the economy back because it held the economy black. slaves should pay reparations to Whites
No that is completely wrong. Macroeconomy can only be understood as a whole. You can't autistically pick one area and start favoritizing it without fricking up the whole economy.
Eqyption cotton replaced southern cotton around the time of the civil war and kept the textile industry going. Also wool was as big of an agricultural product and that was not an industry that relied on slaves.
No idea what you're trying to argue with it. The cotton had to be grown somewhere. It seems you operate under the assumptions that sone sectors of the economy are "less advanced" obsolete, and should be diminished if not entirely gotten rid of in favor of "more advanced" sectors, which is how you completely frick up the economy, as the "less advanced" sectors are needed, and the "more advanced sectors" either process the outputs of or serve those "less advanced" sectors. Or in other words an advanced economy may have steel mills, but you can't advance an economy by pushing capitals into steel mills. You will just have a lot of steel with no use for it. The steel will be made at the expense of not doing things that would be needed more. People may eventually figure out how to use the cheap steel, and then you get into DEEP trouble, as you begin to use steel in bizarre, clearly uneconomical ways, yet become dependent on this uneconomical use. (Compare with the actual modern dependence on cheap transport)
The effect of the industrial revolution was to free up labor for other things while simultaneously increasing the output of those things. That's why it created so much wealth. So yes you can put more capital into steel mills and create more wealth.
No you can't. It needs to happen organically. Steel mills create wealth when they get built because of the rising demand for steel. If you just prop them up because that's what "advanced" economies do, you are using up labor. You may increase the economic activity, but not wealth. (that is people will work more for less)
>The South was not even 10% of the American economy and slavery was not even 50% of Virginia’s economy.
The South accounted for 70% of American export.
>Bantus
AAVE isn't a Bantu language
technically, American Pidgin (AAVE or Ebonics) is a north germanic language. language is cultural, not genetic.
It's not the direct wealth from the slaves that made America rich, but the culture that slaveowners had time to cultivate that did. There is no higher culture when there is no social class afforded universal leisure time.
Ah yes that famous american high culture.
Only New England and Boston are mildly civilized, so if anything you are proving the point slavery didn’t do much
>Ah yes that famous american high culture
The majority of artistic, industrial, and technological innovation and achievement came from the US and UK in the 20th century.
>artistic
lmao
I bet you consider Michael Jackson and the Beatles as an "artistic achievement"
And yours would be NWA and Lil Pump.
What lol? Just come on here and lie. Most of the US's millionaires were in the Mississippi River Valley, guess how they got rich moron.
>we wuz
Didn't read the book, but got the same impression. The south was basically aristocracy, the north was struggling and only pretending to be well off and pretty much needed the war.
Delusional nig dreams. America got rich off hard industry, railway, and northern industrialist spirit. The south was shithole then and still is. America would indisputably be better without the 13% of homies
>the north was struggling and only pretending to be well off and pretty much needed the war.
Kek that's why the south was at a deficit for everything materially and got handedly crushed
>America got rich off hard industry, railway, and northern industrialist spirit.
Nonsensical ideology based on poor logic:
Textile mills produce more money per area => textile mills are better than cotton fields => we can get rich by converting cotton fields into cotton mills. ....uhh ...we don't have cotton now.
(ignoring now that cotton can't be grown in the north anyway, but other crops can)
But the result is always negative, because you either massively boost one "high value" part of the economy, which can only produce such value serving or processing an amount of "low value" parts of the economy, and only produces loss otherwise.
>reasonable minds may disagree about whether productivity growth in the digital age is more about the guy who fixes the toilets at Microsoft or the guys who develop the business plan and write the code
no they can't
You completely misunderstood what I wrote. You need those half billion users who will use Microsoft products to produce more value that it cost to write the code. A thousand Microsofts won't make anyone super wealthy, as you can't really use more than one (as long as it's sufficient quality) except perhaps some niche uses that need an even bigger customer base to produce net value.
So yes, a coder makes more than a plumber, but you can't increase wealth by turning everyone into coders, as they will have nobody to code for.
You still need the plumbers unless you want the coders to waste time fixing the toilet.
or you deprive other parts of the economy, as all the resources go to your beloved industry. So you have a hundred textile mills, but no threshing machines, because all machinery production was used up on mills.
>Comon law is an american thing, to begin with.
The famous American ethnicity. As we all know, West-African immigrants basically created common law in the 18th century out of thin air. Even though they never used it in Africa.
It hadn’t existed for 500+ years in England beforehand, and that itself wasn’t a product of a broader Germanic tradition.
yeah because cotton and tobacco plantations were what made America rich and successful not the whole continent worth of resources at their fingertips
Cotton made israelites rich and succesful when they launched the fashion industry
Plus very early adaption of industrialization and the large amount of exploitable rivers in the north east.
The cost for not just unskilled but low IQ labour would be unsubstantial. If you want reparations for something you didn't endure then you should leave the country after receiving it
It's more anti-white bullshit. Most of the world had slavery and it didn't make them rich. The North was richer than the South. Most wealth was created in booms after ww2 and again after 1990.
This. Nobody talks about the millions sold into slavery by the Barbary pirates and North Africa remains a shithole to this day.
If slavery and imperialism were half as beneficial as leftists make it out to be, it would be a moral imperative to make my people participate in them as much as possible.
It is bullshit. America became rich due to industrialization and the huge technological leaps occurring at the time. The book no doubt claims that slavery gave it the capital necessary, but America had other far greater sources of capital and the civil war nixed most of the capital accumulated due to slavery. It is kind of confirmation bias, authors like Edward Baptist made their careers looking at slavery slavery slavery, a topic of contention in America, however they ignore everything else. Slavery was never even the majority of the economy, only in the south. It is similar with colonialism and Europe. Most economic activity was growing grain, producing steel, manufacturing, most volume of trade was short distance, moving timber and iron ore and such.
It is patently wrong, this isn't /misc/ cope or seethe, these are just the facts. However no doubt r*ddit will claim that any who criticize the book is secretly racist and not look at the facts, but at least on IQfy we can and economic theories like these will never gain traction in China or Turkey or places that do not have such biases.
Why do you think those leaps occurred mostly in the US first?
running water & plentiful surface coal deposits give you a head start in industrialization, same as England and Prussia. and a bountiful agriculture to supply population to the factories. after that it becomes self-sustaining, as people flock to built up industrial cities for work long after the surface deposits run out and the coal has to get brought in by train.
Sure, but you're still forgetting
which is also true. Bottom line is you can't separate the US's success from its history with slavery.
What do you mean slave owner culture? Never heard of that one before
I'm not seeing an argument, just cope.
They didn't. Europe was destroyed twice in the row and forced to adapt an economic system that doesn't work.
Europe was destroyed more than twice. The nepoleonic wars are in this period of history.
It wasn't really America first. The US just saw things that were working in Europe and adopted them. Industrialization originally was water mill technology to make spinning wool and cotton faster. We stole that shit and entrepreneurs plonked water mills across New England. It had nothing to do with coal, it's technology and how you use it
>first
lol the first industrial revolution was in Europe
read a book
What leap in particular? Why do you assume that because America had slavery this was the cause? America also had buffalo and apple pie. By your reasoning the mere presence of these things must mean they were the cause too. The industrial revolution was a long series of technological advancements and economic changes and you can go right ahead and look at it in more detail, you can look at economics in the modern world and try to determine how economies grow, there are plenty of other explanations and a lot more to it.
You just have very poor reasoning, you are plain incorrect. I'm sorry if you think this theory furthers the cause of anti-racism or something, but facts are facts. At best the profits of slavery sped up industrialization, but even this is debatable and the idea the US would not be a wealthy country 157 years later is absurd.
I would say this is bait, but apparently many who read the book believe it. The opposite is probably true, by espousing such silly theories you are giving ammunition to racists.
Do they mention who the slave owners were?
I thought the industrial revolution and the steel industry and our abundant natural resources made us rich.
It’s pretty impressive how fast these threads boil American slaves down to gdp/units of cotton picked.
Humanitards should be thankful that far more autistic physicists aren’t interested in their field.
> thinks electrons actually
> confused why no one respects him
The South was completely irrelevant. Just a bunch of violent morons LARPing as aristocracy and breeding their pet Blacks. Dixie was worthless culturally and economically.
Dunno, is it true in the rest of the americas?
Slavery was a crucial part of the cotton economy but I can't imagine it being a 'but for' factor, given that cotton was successfully grown without chattel slavery as the primary source of labor.
Slavery was core to the South's economic base and drove a large part of early migration to the region for both European colonizers and African slaves. During the colonial period and for many of the years following, southern states were largely dependent on cash crops like tobacco, indigo, rice, and later cotton. In nearly all cases, these crops would not have been financially viable without the use of slave labor. Prior to the Civil War, the South would not have constituted any substantial part of the country economically, politically, or population-wise without slavery.
Although the North was not entirely divorced from slavery's influence, their economies were not largely dependent on it in the same way as the South. Even prior to independence, northern states had a long history of economic reliance on manufacturing and various cottage industries. While these industries did include textile mills which were in large part fueled by southern cotton, they also included many other types of manufacturing industries such as ship building, tool-making, and furniture-making. Most of later northern industrialization was driven by Appalachian coal and steel production.