The Poverty of Slavery | Robert Wright | Ep. 38

thank you [Music] joining the podcast today is Dr Robert E Wright an economic historian a senior research fellow at the American Institute for economic research and in his own words an anti-paternalist classical liberal political Economist Robert has taught business economics and policy courses at Augustana University nyu's Stern School of Business Temple University and the University of Virginia he has authored or co-authored numerous articles for important academic journals including the American Economic Review business history review independent review and Southern Economic Review and he is also the author or editor of over two dozen major books book series and edited collections he's very prolific including the book the poverty of slavery how unfree labor pollutes the economy he has served on the board of historians against slavery an NGO since since 2012. how are you Robert I am doing great how are you it is so wonderful to be on this uh podcast I'm not a huge consumer of podcasts in fact I think I have been a guest on more podcasts than I have actually ever listened to uh with two exceptions uh one is macro musings and the other one is uh this podcast wow well I appreciate your time um so praising your book James Brewer Stewart the founder of historians against slavery said this book is a vigorous rejoinder to the oft repeated historical claim that immense profits derived from slavery powered the development of today's all-consuming system of globalized capitalism when arguing persuasively for the contrary view that slavery produced impoverishment not affluence Robert Wright Marshall's arguments based on a truly encyclopedic familiarity with slavery systems the world over in the past as well as the presence the debate that this book should initiate is very much welcome and timely in the extreme and it does feel very timely with you know things like the 1619 project and the public conversation this is always a topic that people return to so we'll go through the different parts of the book chapter by chapter but first tell me why you decided to write this book and about the book in general well I decided to write the book because I I couldn't believe what I was seeing coming out of um Progressive or I guess we would call them now woke historians this was uh you know I wrote the bulk of the book in 2015 and 2016 which was you know prior to the whole uh uh you know 1619 project but there were Scholars who were publishing books that were getting quite a bit of traction because they were Ivy League you know historians with uh with fancy fancy titles and endowed chairs and whatnot and they were arguing what the pro-slavery people used to argue in the United States which is that um America would not be rich without slavery and what they are trying to do is to set up a case for reparations to say hey look we're wealthy today but it's only because we had slavery in the past and now it's time that uh you know we we repay that debt and it is um completely wrong and wrong-headed and uh as you know my colleague um that now my colleague Phil Phil Magnus has really been in the weeds uh with this uh showing many of the very specific problems with those books and with the 16 19 project uh my book uh the poverty of slavery is more of a step back a look not just at the United States but all systems of enslavement from the prehistoric period up to the present and um I don't ever find an instance where slavery leads to anything more than profits for slaveholders it never helps overall economies and it really can't for the reasons that I'm sure we'll get into in more detail uh shortly so that's the the gists of the book The whole idea is to cut off that reparations notion uh based on um some very uh poorly thought out um you know economic story that slavery leads to uh economic growth and development you know so the first chapter entitled yet another half Untold provides a sort of introduction to the book and explains your objectives um you know putting to rest this claim that slavery can ever be economically beneficial and you mentioned a number of times when you heard people make claims like this how pervasive is this belief that slavery was or can be economically beneficial it's much too pervasive uh once again I mean it was thoroughly trounced in the in the 19th century and only a few you know racist historians like UB um uh Phillips you know kind of kept some of it alive for for a while but it pretty much petered out until the the New Millennium and then we started to get books like the the Ed Baptist uh book um the path Untold uh that uh you know forms the basis for the uh for for for the sort of uh tongue-in-cheek chapter title you had another half um you know Untold and uh that that helps me to get into you know some basic economic Concepts like opportunity cost and uh of course basquiats uh window you know that which is seen and that which is unseen so the the main um sort of thrust of the books by um Baptist and um Sven beckert and Walter Johnson um those uh latter two teach at Harvard and um Baptist is at uh at Cornell and then a a whole raft of of other Scholars that kind of you know tried to tried to uh follow in their in their wake um is to to concentrate on the profits that slavery uh produced right so there were some rich slaveholders and uh so they say while those Rich slave holders um you know drove economic growth in in the United States in Great Britain um because the British of course had uh have had slave colonies uh as well and um this leads to um this horrible generalization that they all like to to this horrible label they all like to bring up capitalism uh which is a term that uh I personally try to avoid uh whenever possible because there's not really a um a single agreed upon definition of it it's used by different people in in different ways I prefer to uh look at economic growth and development both of which of course we can measure more or less um but the notion of Baptists and beckert and uh Johnson and these other folks was that slavery created capitalism and capitalism creates uh wealth and um it's just a very uh flawed uh story it's um oversimplified undefined and what I try to do in that first chapter is to uh to point that out to point out the political objective which is to make a case for reparations today um and to uh you know try to explain that um making reparations even if their case is correct um and you know we we owe something to uh the descendants of of slaves uh it's still fraught with all kinds of difficulties because uh almost everyone um has been descended from at least one slave holder and at least one slave over the courses of of their genealogies and so um you know sorting sorting that all out uh is is next to uh impossible and in the end we would just be paying paying ourselves um so and of course this issue is coming up again because of what's going on in California uh right now there was a couple years where reparations were hardly mentioned because everyone was so focused on on covid and mandates and lockdowns and whatnot uh but you're right it is coming back uh in in force uh even though there's there's you know no no intellectual justification for it uh whatsoever and a lot uh against it so let's get into the case uh against it um but before well actually before we get into that we have to look at the framework that you set out in the book right about the various degrees of Liberty we need to define slavery and talk about this idea you present that slavery is not a simple yes or no condition but rather there's a Continuum of degrees of slavery or essentially a score that you could apply to someone with regards to how free they are can you tell me about that yeah I mean I'm I'm an historian by training but um I'm very analytical uh compared to most historians so you know I like uh to be able to to quantify things the extent possible and I like to uh be very precise and in defining terms and that's why I I don't use the the word capitalism except uh ironically or in a quote you know quotation or what have you um and uh the the term slavery is also uh you know contested and um I looked at the the history of different definitions of the word you know as far back as we have language all the way up to to the present and um just began to to sort of um keep track of the different ways in which the the word was was used and I ended up with uh 20 questions that could be posed to an individual or could be posed to uh you know a historical group uh and the answers to those 20 Questions uh don't lead to uh yeah you're a slave or no you're not a slave it leads to a scale a scale of freedom and so when you start to apply this to individuals or to a different historical groups you can get a pretty good idea of who was more enslaved than others so a channel slave in the Antebellum U.S worked on a a gang system and a cotton field uh or or in a sugar you know sugar Plantation uh score zero on this um so that's that's pretty enslaved right that can't be more enslaved absolutely it's CEOs and most tenured College professors at least until recently fall at the other end of the spectrum they tend to score 19 or or 20. uh whereas um you know wage laborers in the 19th century tended to score around seven or eight but today they score more around 15 or so um the the questions that compose the the freedom scale are are questions like uh do you get paid in cash or some other liquid uh asset you know like stock options or what have you because if you don't then your employer can control you like with company script in the in the 19th and the 20th the first part of the 20th century uh many workers would get paid in company script that was only good at The Company Store and so obviously that decreases their their Liberty because they can't save in a way that would allow them to move to another job for example um there are questions like uh if you can marry on the same terms that your employer can't uh and if you can then you know that's fine but if you can't then obviously you know your Liberty is uh is a little is a little bit less so the the scale works really well um in terms of comparing different workers at different times and trying to figure out why sometimes workers were so um got so peeved peeved off and a lot of times it was because their their freedom score uh was reduced by the terms of their contract there was a type of Channel slave in the Antebellum U.S for example uh who worked on a task system rather than a gang system in the rice plantations and the lowlands in Georgia and South Carolina and their freedom score was more like in the in the three to four range because they they weren't under the Lash all day you know being being worked in this gang they were given so many acres of um rice paddies to ten too and once they tended to that they were on their own their own time for the rest of the day so it was still a dreadful uh situation as the three to four score indicates but it was it was better than the the Gang worked cotton slave uh when emancipation comes the southerners the former slaveholders start to have their workers sign contracts that were very prohibitive and so we didn't go from a status of pure enslavement to to a bunch of CEOs running around right to to close to Pure Pure Freedom instead you know slaves Maybe started to score a two former slaves a two or a three because of how restrictive these labor contracts were well the rice Plantation slaves actually saw the contracts as more restrictive to their freedom than they had been living under in slavery so they were not at all happy and there was all kinds of uh unrest in that area uh and lowland uh South Carolina immediately following the Civil War not because of emancipation per se but because of emancipation followed by this regime of very strict uh labor labor contracts uh it also helps us to make distinctions um between wage laborers that were under you know restrictive uh contracts and what would later be called as free laborers people who had much more discretion in the terms of of their work so for example uh in the 19th century there were many farm girls that ended up in places like Lowell Massachusetts working in textile mills they were wage laborers their um lives were highly restricted by the the corporations that employed them so they score more like in the you know the seven to eight uh range on the freedom scale as opposed to you know 14 15 16 that most quote unquote free laborers later on uh would uh would enjoy and then your third chapter is an overview of slavery um prehistoric times up to the great emancipations of the 19th century and there's a lot to discuss there so let's start with the Deep history of slavery in ancient times tell me about slavery in the distant past and that Evolution and then we'll move forward in time well uh it you know slavery the the big point is that slavery is uh ubiquitous over time in space uh most societies had some type of uh person that might not go by the name of a slave that would you know score very low on on the freedom scale that I just uh described so uh and and uh even Channel slavery uh with outright ownership and scores of zero to one were quite um common throughout uh history and throughout the globe uh determining exactly when and where though especially in the prehistoric period is difficult because you have to interpret the physical record and so some things like uh prehistoric chains have been found made from Iron uh we're pretty sure that those those folks were enslaved there's not a lot of these that have survived but that's part of the nature of the archaeological record right you don't know um because you find four or five of these uh you there could have been you know forty thousand fifty thousand hundreds of thousands of them uh produced back then and especially with something like iron because it can rust away or it can be repurposed right so you're using iron to Shackle slaves uh but um you know it starts to break or rust or what have it they would then recast that iron into some other product so uh that is a loss of course to the to the archaeological uh record uh we can look at things like sex ratios in existing you know collections of of Bones and and try to glean something uh from that uh there was a massacre for example um on what's now called the Missouri River and what's now South Dakota that happens uh in in pre-columbian Prius you know prehistoric times and the the bones showed um you know a wide range of men who were killed uh and very old females but hardly any females of reproductive age so how could this have been a functioning Society with hardly any females of reproductive uh age um well it's likely that what happened was this raid occurred and this massacre occurred because it was a slave raid and the Raiders wanted reproductive age females that's why they're not represented in um in the mass grave of of that Massacre site because they weren't killed they were taken and and uh and and enslaved um I I think that slavery probably came about as the same time as the domestication of animals because uh many of the same Technologies uh are involved and uh one aspect of slavery has always been uh to treat the enslaved as non-human uh and I think that this comes you know from the fact that you know this is happening at the same time that we are domesticating or uh enslaving if you will you know goats and cattle and chickens and and so on and and so forth um some some of the techniques that are used in animal husbandry are also used on slaves like castrating young males um so there's a there's a lot of similarities between the two but we don't know for sure but we do know as soon as we start to get uh written records slaves are ubiquitous and they're in the written record and there's nobody saying hey there's this new thing here it's always in the context of hey this is common and everyone knows what this is you know going all the way back to the Epic of uh of Gilgamesh right and of course they're slaves in the Bible and um you know they're just all over the the written the written record uh as soon as it emerges so we're quite confident uh that um slavery was ubiquitous and and had a had a deep history even you know thousands of years ago when we when we finally first start recording uh things and you see them in in early account accounts uh slaves will will show up as assets often right next to uh you know the livestock and the number of um you know the the number of acres of land and and all that sort of sort of stuff so we're quite confident in that and uh by the time we start to get into you know the ancient Greek period the ancient um Roman period the Roman Empire uh slavery's very well entrenched uh there's a wide variety of different forms of uh of bonded or or unfree uh labor um like the the helots uh and and some parts of ancient Greece there's no modern analog for um they're kind of like surfs or kind of like slaves it's like this hybrid thing um and there's there's different uh grades of of slaves and of uh debt peons and it's really um a diverse ecosystem indicating that it's something that had been around for a long time was it involving different forms to meet uh to to meet economic and political circumstances in in different countries it's also widespread in India it's widespread in China in East Asia Southeast Asia it's huge in Africa Africa there's an internal slave trade there's a slave trade between North Africa and Europe between East Africa and the various Indian Ocean civilizations and and and Arabia there was a every everyone's heard of the Silk Road uh there was also a slave a slave Road where human beings are being shipped from one area to another uh slaves are very interesting economically for a number of reasons and one is that they become more valuable the further and further away from their source that they that they go uh and and they can also carry themselves there and they can also carry other Goods with them right so there's a very strong incentive to seize or buy slaves in one area and then to use them to transport themselves and goods to to other areas for sale and the reason why they're more valuable the further away from home they are is because they become easier and easier to control they don't know how to get back home they don't know the local uh language or or Customs they stand out as different and hence if they were to try to escape they're more easily identified and then uh you know return to their to their masters to their owners um so uh the word slave itself it comes from slav right because that's the English word slave comes from slob yes the the uh the Latin term cervous service comes uh you know is uh we we now use a servant or surf so in English yeah there's this and and that's because um you know Eastern European Eastern Europe was a major source of slaves um Western Europe was a major source of slaves uh as as well and not many people appreciate this I mean uh really sophisticated folks like um you know Tom Soule knows this extremely well um he's even argued that uh more Western Europeans were enslaved than than Africans at least in the transatlantic part of that um uh of that Global slaving system um you know Benjamin Franklin for example was last Public Act was to sort of mock uh slaveholders in the U.S by by pointing to the enslavement of Europeans by uh Muslims in North Africa and the Muslims use the same justifications for slavery that the the slaveholders in in the U.S used they're not really people we can convert them to the one true religion uh it's better for them to be slaves with us than to be out on their own in their you know barbarous barbarous land and and so on and so forth um so uh so yeah and then uh Central and and South America North America and pre-contact there was also slavery and there's all kinds you know traditionally anthropologists and archaeologists didn't want to recognize it in the New World um part of that myth of the the noble savage is that sometimes sometimes called but various Indian groups American Indian groups enslaved uh enslaved people with with regularity it's clearest in the northwest um but even the Eastern Woodlands ones um Mesoamerican ones the Inca you know they all had forms of of bonded labor and again it doesn't look exactly like the chattel slavery with you know people of A different race laboring out in in in in the fields and and whatnot um but uh they are still very much on the low end of that of that freedom skill that so we discussed earlier so yeah slavery is uh ubiquitous and it's it's going every which direction sometimes at the same time um where you have Vikings who are raiding the the English the English and the Irish coasts and then taking the slaves and selling them in in North Africa the north Africans are raiding throughout the Mediterranean and sometimes they even raided up the teams uh in in what today is is written uh and and took slaves and so it's it's not a phenomenon of what western Europeans did to Africans it's what humans had been doing to humans over millennia right so it's Global it's been going on since time immemorial um but then uh tell me about how that evolved into the chattel slavery um that we're all familiar with from the colonial era and because it's very important I think there's a question to understand uh how this Norm that had existed for so long changed how did we get those great emancipations of the 19th century uh well the Great emancipations have been overplayed because we don't especially when you start to think of slavery along a Continuum right because we we go from we don't go from slave to free we go from chattel slave to somebody who's has a little bit more freedom but not a whole heck of a of a lot so I already mentioned how uh some some slaves who were relatively free in the The Old Dixie model um actually felt as though they were less Fray under the under the new contractual uh model uh there's all sorts of um quasi-slaveries that sprang up uh especially in the the South following the Civil War and some historians like um you know Doug Blackman and David oshinski have recaptured a lot of this for us but basically um you would have people using the exception in the 13th Amendment in order to to to reduce other you know to reduce people back towards slavery back towards being a bonded or a coerced laborer so uh you'd pass a law that said okay well if you're if you're a vagrant or you're quote unquote loitering then you're subject to fine and or imprisonment then sheriffs uh you know police officers constables go out and they find people who don't have any obvious means of employment and they arrest them for that and then they're brought before magistrate and the magistrate says you're guilty of this you got to pay a five dollar fine and the person says well we don't have five dollars and the judge is like that's okay uh you can work it off and then they're sold or their debt technically is sold to a plantation owner or to uh coal mine and they effectively become slaves and in some ways they're much worse off than the channel slaves of before the the Civil War because uh the channel slaves um you know were worth hundreds and at the end you know a thousand plus dollars for a prime age male field hand right they were very valuable uh assets so slave holders uh did not um generally uh you know abuse them to death um because they're they're they're so valuable right they have a they have a interest in the slaves continuing to be healthy enough to to do the work uh required on on the Plantation uh so you know doctors uh would would be hired to to tend to them if they said oh you know I'm not feeling very well today oftentimes they were they were given you know time time off because the the slaveholder didn't want to risk this pretty you know valuable um asset uh in the postpelling period under this convict Leasing system that arose the amounts that are paid for men who were already fully grown right the the uh the the uh the employer didn't have to put a bunch of resources in years and years uh into first um and buy for just a few dollars well they they think nothing of working them to death because why not you can always go get another one for for five dollars so they complain about medical you know too bad keep working um they had much a stricter stricter punishments uh for these men because again they didn't really care if they they lived or died they were just looking for compliant workers um workers who would uh who who would work uh work hard and if not then they're they're fine to put them in the ground uh because you know they don't have very much uh invested uh in them so these modern forms of slavery that came out of the old chattel system and some ways are much much harsher than uh than than the old the old not to glorify the old system anyway it's still it's still horrible but um just looking at the the self-interest of the slave holder um you know it was vastly vastly different what what Simon Legree does um to Uncle Tom and Uncle Tom's Cabin you know was was was pretty unusual um and it's only after Tom just shows his you know that he's going to be utterly recalcitrant that Legree finally finally kills him right um he gives them a lot of slack because Tom's very very valuable uh worker uh but in in the new slaveries that arise you know they paid very little for the slaves and and so uh they're they're they're happy to uh you know to to work them to death if they're not going to um you know provide those rents that the the enslavers want and of course that's really what this is all about right is is it's a form of it's a form of rent seeking a form of uh theft and of course some were worked to death under Channel slavery as well especially in places like the Caribbean you saw all sorts of different conditions depending on what location you're looking at right but um we're getting ahead of ourselves a little bit can you tell me about the rise of the transatlantic slave trade and the rise of the anti-slavery movement because obviously throughout history there have been sporadic criticisms of slavery there have been brief bands on trading slaves at different times in history but how did we get to a point where that legal change uh stuck well I it it sticks uh let's talk about the rise of the system before we talk about how it yeah it was it was not a European invention because um Africa had already been decimated by these different slaving systems the one where Muslims come down from the from the north and um they either seize uh sub-Saharan Africans outright or they purchased them they trade for them uh with um other sub-Saharan you know enslavers and there's also this system on the East where uh sub-sahaf sub-Saharan in Africa South African slaves are uh or Africans are being enslaved and then shipped to uh India and Southeast Asia and and China uh and and and and so forth so um the European Zone invented they they just come into this system that's already there and they start to uh either go to places that were relatively cloistered previously because just from the sheer distance the transaction costs you might say of these other two systems or because they start to outbid the other the other enslavers uh the other slave Traders and so they start to take um you know slaves uh slaves away to where work in the plantations in the Caribbean and in Brazil and in North North America relatively small percentage of them actually end up in in North America um because as we talked about previously there did development the system in North America where the um the slaves are valuable they're kept healthy enough that not only do they work they also reproduce which is fairly unusual and enslaved systems and the Caribbean systems for example they often work people to death the average of like seven years and those populations are not um they're not self reproducing they're they're dependent on the slave trade they're dependent on this new stream of of enslaved Africans uh coming in so that makes it possible once there's finally the development of um any slavery abolitionist ideas pretty much I mean in in the earlier period there were a few groups like in ancient Greece that uh said this probably isn't right but they never really gained traction but they started to gain Traction in the 18th century and the 19th uh early 19th century in the Anglo world and it's eased by the fact that there is this other source of Labor that's available and that Source are uh what are called Indian coolies or uh Chinese coolies they're indentured laborers so they're not Channel slaves or they're not they're legally not Channel slaves but they are very low on the freedom scale so uh the places in in the British Empire for example that have been relying on um African slaves simply switch over to these indentured laborers so they're still you know able to continue more or less business as usual but uh you know people convince themselves that these folks weren't weren't slaves because they signed contracts and it turns out that um you know they really didn't give their consent to any of this they were lied to they were illiterate um and you know so the fact that they they made their mark on a piece of paper and the language that they don't even know is hardly indication we know today of their actually giving consent uh also we consider consent today not just sort of pre-consent or we agree to a contract but ongoing consent right where today we think well if somebody doesn't like their employment situation they should be able to to leave it and we do make a few exceptions for like movie stars and professional athletes and so on and so forth you know we allowed to lock themselves into contracts but one of the conditions of Free Labor is that we don't allow that um for for the vast majority of the of the workforce right they can leave when they want um so they have to give a continuing consent but these early indentured laborers they were signing up for you know three five ten years at a time um lied to about the conditions when they get there they don't like what's going on but there's nothing they can do about it at that point because they're 2 000 mile sea trip away from home they don't know any of the local Customs or anything they stick out like sore thumbs if they try to escape so um it's something very close to channel slavery and that's what helped you know end that formal slavery because these Alternatives were were available so yeah it's it's not a happy story of uh you know here comes Wilberforce and the next thing you know you know the British have outlawed slavery and blah blah blah um it's uh much um much more complicated nuanced uh story than that though still progress right that is just not a big note and maybe uh an important thing to think about there is not just the change in the practice which may have been in practice many people going from a zero to a three but the change of how people thought about slavery because throughout most of history people for the most part did not question slavery's morality most people throughout history just sort of accepted that that's the way things were and then in the lead up to uh you know the Civil War many people would make arguments that Not only was it not uh bad some people tried to claim it was actually very good and there were debates related to that so can you talk about the change in how people thought about slavery uh yeah you're absolutely right for most of uh human history recorded history there's very little resistance to to slavery it's thought to be something natural uh it's thought to be a good thing even for the enslaved because uh they could if if they were seized in a war for example which is one of the major ways that people over time have been become enslaved uh well you could have been killed right then and there so you weren't killed right then and there so that so enslaving it was a good thing um that uh you know you did a bad thing right so there's so there's always been this this element of uh how do you pay restitution to society uh for for breaking the law well we you know not many societies are just throwing people into um cells where they do nothing and need to be fed and why not all right most of the time it's okay well we could put corporal punishment on you um even capital punishment and take your life but we're not going to do that we're going to allow you to live but you're going to have to uh do what this person tells you to do for the rest of your for the rest of your life uh or if you owe a big debt and you can't uh or any debt and you can't repay it uh you know we could uh do very nasty things to you but we're just going to enslave you instead uh was was sort of the the mentality but you know the enlightenment comes along and we start thinking about Liberty and um there are some people who start to interpret the Bible in a way that makes it um seem like it's not uh you know especially the New Testament doesn't jive with uh with with enslaving others and uh I think that we finally start to come to to realize that uh one person enslaving another actually hurts everyone economically hurts them morally too in some way but you know that that's a bit slippier you know more more slippery of a concept but um we uh come to realize that slavery creates very large negative externalities or pollution and uh and it's because people do not want to be enslaved and there are some cases of people with like Stockholm syndrome or sometimes supposedly the the victims of the the uh the slaughterhouses as they're called in in English these um horrific rape brothels uh in Suburban Paris where women uh have to service men 12 hours a day one right after the other um with a with a six minute rule in place um you know you do they do that for years and and they they're just um you know they they it's very difficult to come back uh from that um but in most instances uh people who are enslaved still have uh enough sense of of self that they don't want to be enslaved and they resist and they resist in Myriad ways uh that reduce the enslavers profits but the enslavers um often get subsidies from the government to to help them to continue to uh extract rents from from these Unfortunate Souls so that might be a good segue to um the fifth chapter I think over the course of our conversation you've already covered much of the fourth chapter which is about how slavery in many senses continued after the formal dissolution of it but the fifth chapter that which is seen in slavery's profits this is about some of those arguments that people made at the time and support of slavery they claimed it was economically necessary before people started making that realization that it wasn't can you tell me about the enslavers profits uh I mean there were some enslavers who were simply incompetent and and they didn't profit but um you know there's a distribution of profits uh you know you can think of it like a like a normal distribution right um and as as far as we can tell the uh sort of the the median profitability is above the median profitability for um other endeavors at the same level of risk so in other words uh what would the finance people call that an alpha there's an alpha there's a uh there there's a um above risk adjusted average return a rent an economic rent that uh the median in in slaver is taking and of course some of them are wildly profitable out the tail and some of them are incompetent and and actually managed to lose money with slaves somehow um but generally generally speed and if you think about it uh and I guess this ties into a chapter I wrote in a in a book from 2010 called fubaromics the chapter is called Uncle Tom's Cabin uh where I have a model of why firms choose different labor labor sources and why use slaves versus uh using family labor versus using wage labor versus using an indentured uh indentured labor so these folks are choosing to use slaves they're doing it rationally they must think that they're getting some Advantage from from doing that and it appears as though they they are uh or they are today and they and they did in the canonical you know Antebellum South the problem is um that you can't go from profitability to being good for the economy right that gets into the next two chapters absolutely let's let's move there so uh yeah slavery creates all kinds of negative externalities or or pollution right there are costs that are borne by society that are not embedded in the market transactions and the price of of slaves uh and yeah these two very long chapters with tons and tons of detail from lots of different uh lots of different places and and time periods but they all show that by resisting their enslavement slaves um create control costs and enslavers often manage to put those control costs on the rest of society um because they control the the polity or because uh nobody in the case today that not enough people care enough to to stop them from from doing it so uh there used to be slave patrols for example in the U.S where poor whites had to go out like a militia Duty had to go out at night and walk around and look for slaves that might be up to no good there were public armories just uh for the event of a slave Insurrection uh so that the militia could be called out or the federal government could be called there was this massive slave uh Rebellion for example in Louisiana in 1811 that hardly anyone talks about for reasons that that aren't clear but the federal government had to intercede in that uh you have these fugitive slave laws where if slaves managed to escape and they escaped into a a free state a state that no longer countenance Channel slavery uh it was the duty of the citizens of that state to apprehend The Runaway and return them to the to the slave owner um there's this whole legal code that has to to come with all its uh attendance um you know costs and and inefficiencies there's the fact that um slaveholders weren't landlords somewhat truly as they were labor Lords so they would deplete the fertility of their lands and simply buy more land out west and bring their slaves along with them well that meant that they didn't have many really long-term ties to particular communities so they didn't invest in the the churches and the the banks and the railroads and all like they did in the north because they didn't have an incentive to do that because they're expecting in 20 years that they're going to be moving to uh you know to Fresh to Fresh lands um the uh literacy rates in the South were abysmal and compared especially compared to the to the north um because the safeholders didn't want there to be non-slaveholders who were intelligent and who thought for themselves because they might start to question this the system that the the slaveholders were creating uh you know in order to make slavery as profitable as as possible for the for themselves uh so there's lots and lots of these uh sorts of instances uh not just slave rebellions there are Maroon societies as they're called that would crop up where uh if slaves didn't have a place to go where they could be free they would go to Wild places and create their own communities and then raid the the the slave communities um this is huge throughout history and even in the even in the United States in the early the early 19th century and so the public resources are put towards that the Republic whipping stations if you're um you know a dainty Southern Belle and your husband's off on business and you have house slaves who are getting uppity uh you can't very well get get out the cat of nine tails yourself and and whip them right but there was a public whipping station where you could take your slaves and say please whip the slave on my behalf uh and and they'd be they'd be whipped so there's lots and lots of of costs that are being put out on the entire Society in order to keep slaves manageable and that allows slavery to be profitable and uh extra profitable in in some and sometimes in places right so while overall hurting me well hurting the overall economy yeah right so it's not just a form of moral progress but also uh kind of economic progress and uh that brings us to the eighth chapter on real abolition you talk about the various forms of forced labor and levels of slavery that still persist I'm curious about whether there's been any progress to note since this book's released in in 2017 on that and uh if you can just talk a little bit about some of these issues today with slavery and the threat of a return to slavery through paternalism uh yeah so um I guess big big picture the good news is that right now we're probably at a point in history where this the smallest percentage of the human population is enslaved right um there are eight billion people now we know uh more or less uh and you know because it's illegal we don't have super firm numbers but roughly 50 million people are enslaved so that's a very tiny percentage of the the global population that's great news the 50 million though might be the highest number of individuals who have ever been enslaved in history simply because population levels were much much lower in the past so um that that's not such good news and just 50 million regardless of its percentage is a lot of individual people to be under these these circumstances uh about half of them are sex slaves about a quarter of them are domestic slaves so they're being worked in people's homes and about a quarter are being worked in Agricultural and generally like aggro uh what's the term for agribusiness uh agri-industrial like making turpentine for example um so they're out in secluded areas um and they are creating a you know a product a manufactured product um but they're they're not making spaceships or things like that uh it's it's not a good idea to try to enslave people to to do fancy technological stuff as Hitler discovered in the second the Second World War so um we're in in a position where you know there are lots of people to help but it's not like um you know the the negative externalities being created by slavery today or are as immense as they were in the Antebellum United States uh but they're they're still uh you know not not insignificant especially given that many of these slaves are also used to degrade the environment many of the people you know Burning Down the uh rainforests in Brazil are enslaved uh many of the people destroying um Mangrove forests in South Asia are enslaved because um enslaving others works well with other criminal activity right it's already a crime to enslave others why not throw you know destruction of natural resources and on top of that why not throw drugs and um and arms you know gun smuggling and on top of that so we've seen the development of um you know organized crime syndicates throughout the world that engage in what's sometimes called the big three um guns girls and um drugs so you know it's a it's a constant struggle uh the pandemic did not help um it looks like uh that there were some people who were enslaved when the lockdowns occurred were uh killed or allowed to die because they couldn't generate the economic value and they weren't worth keeping around especially when people started to realize that it was going to be more than two weeks to flatten the curve sort of sort of thing you just don't want to release your slaves because then their Witnesses potentially against you um and uh also many people became increasingly um uh fragile during the course of the the pandemic and the lockdowns and the mandates and and so forth uh they lost income and they become more vulnerable to uh to enslavement and so uh yeah it doesn't look like the last few years have been have been very good but uh you know I think technology might be able to help technology in the past has certainly helped to to get over that that long transition from Channel slaves to debt peons and indentured servants and whatnot more towards um uh wage labor and and free labor for example machines pick cotton now we don't have human beings bending over fields in Oklahoma and and the area outside of Lubbock Texas you know picking picking cotton machines to it uh so machines could also help uh in certain you know aspects of of modern modern slavery slavery and sex trafficking again about half of which is is you know the sex the sex industry so what about the threat I've heard you talk about the threat of a return to slavery because again it's very unusual historically for there to be widespread agreement that that slavery is bad thank goodness we all know uh you know outside of a couple of groups like the Islamic State pretty much agree that it's bad what would be the threat of a uh reversal on that of a change back towards slavery oh any major um economic disruption could easily bring it back and you know I doubt that uh the word slave would be used at least at first um just like in the past they'd come up with with some some euphemism for it and we know now you know how how plastic or pliable words have become right uh who who knows what um what label could be given to them but uh if you if you watch any sort of uh sci-fi dystopian apocalyptic uh story like these Zombie thing there's always slavery that's being that's being redone um in in one form or or another it's um you know unless you have a government that supports uh life liberty and and property and can protect that then people go back to the old um Trader raid thought all the time right because right now most of us still just default to trade we want to work together find our mutually beneficial uh interests and and exchange but we could very easily slip back into a situation where if you see another person you're not thinking oh what can I exchange with them from for mutually beneficial gain it might be simply how do I Bonk this person on the head and uh take control of either their stuff or maybe the person themselves and you've talked about also thinking again slavery is kind of a Continuum you've talked about the rise of paternalistic thinking and how that relates to this issue yeah there was some interesting experimental research being done um by some students of Alvin Roth before the pandemic that showed at least in Germany that paternalism is Rife and people's thinking and they did it by presumably having an experiment about eating bugs uh and they'd have you know people would say well yeah what would your reservation price be to eat that disgusting thing right there and people would give their answers and whatnot but what they really wanted to test was if people were willing to say that other people can't eat the bug and they found you know like 90 percent of people were willing to do that wanted to do that wanted to say I don't think that anyone should be allowed to eat this bug for less than 500 or 500 euro yeah because it's it's Germany they repeated the experiment with um uh interest rates um basically saying okay you can get five euro tomorrow for partaking in this experiment or you can get 50 Euro in a year which do you prefer and of course you know most educated people are going to say well give me 50 at least pack me you know when interest rates were low yeah give me give me 50 in a year but um the real experiment was do you want to make other people do the same choice that you've made and again like 90 of the people in these studies in Germany were saying yes I don't think anyone should be allowed to take the five euro tomorrow because obviously you know you should take the 50 Euro in a year uh and so uh what I was what I was hoping was to see more of these sorts of so we can't do them historically obviously but to see more of these sorts of scientific uh economic economic experiments being done in different cultures uh to see if this is a German thing or if this is a human thing or the extent to which it is dependent upon uh Educational Systems or or if it's something in inherent in in humanity where we want to think that we know what's better for for other people which of course was a main justification for for slavery and could become again right um you're not capable of making decisions yourself I will make those decisions for you and you're going to be better off for it which of course is a lot of what government does as well well I think there's still obviously a long way to go but I think there's little doubt that the abolition of legal slavery has constituted one of Humanity's greatest moral achievements it's definitely worth talking about for the human progress podcast and um you know the ongoing struggle against slavery is one of the greatest moral imperatives are doing important work there and your research has also shown that uh this dramatic Global change in Norms around slavery is not just a moral Victory but is also crucial to human Prosperity so thank you again for speaking with me on this podcast and I hope everyone listening will check out your book again it's the poverty of slavery how unfree labor pollutes the economy and your other work on this topic thank you

Channel: Human Progress

Views: 724

Keywords: Innovation, Human Progress, progress, Libertarianism, Freedom, Milton Freedman, Liberty, Free Market, Jordan Peterson, Steven Pinker, Matt Ridley, Liberal Democracy

Id: ok0t30z6HNk

Length: 66min 14sec (3974 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 16 2023