| ▲ | ceejayoz 4 hours ago |
| > Being able to lounge around while others toil for your gain is absolutely economic. And being comfortable doing it via slave labor is cultural. > if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita If you exclude the murders, Ted Bundy was a really nice guy. |
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| ▲ | inglor_cz 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Prior to the steam engine, what sources of energy you have? The wind and the water, both rather limited to specific activities (milling, sailing). And the power of human and animal muscle. Where the animals are stronger, but also much dumber, so most of the actual hard work has to be done by human hands. Basically all the settled civilizations used some sort of non-free or at best semi-free labour. Villeiny, serfdom, prisoners of war, slavery of all sorts, or having low castes do the worst work. And given that humans are very good at rationalizing away their conditions, the cultures adapted to being comfortable with it, even considering the societal inequality as something ordained by the gods or karma. |
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| ▲ | ceejayoz 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | > Prior to the steam engine, what sources of energy you have? Oxen? Paid laborers? It's not like the American South was unique in needing farm workers. > Basically all the settled civilizations used some sort of non-free or at best semi-free labour. The South was notable in clinging to slavery long after it had been abolished elsewhere. > And given that humans are very good at rationalizing away their conditions, the cultures adapted to being comfortable with it, even considering the societal inequality as something ordained by the gods or karma. Good, then we agree; it was at least in part cultural. | | |
| ▲ | inglor_cz 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | "Oxen? Paid laborers? " In other words, animal and human muscle, we agree on that. I didn't claim that all human labour was non-free, far from that. Every classical civilization had paid artisans and employees as well. But the paid professions tended to be the skilled ones, and the non-free ones tended to be the arduous, backbreaking ones. "The South was notable in clinging to slavery long after it had been abolished elsewhere." Elsewhere where? If I look at the timeline of slavery abolition on Wikipedia, it seems that the South was not even the last holdout in the Americas, much less worldwide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave... They were about as delayed as Russia. (Serfdom in Russia was not quite slavery, but brutal and backward nonetheless.) And the timeline of slavery abolition seems to dovetail with the expansion of the Industrial Revolution across the globe quite tightly, or not? "it was at least in part cultural." Chicken, egg. This is a system stretching over millennia with endless feedback loops. Runaway slaves may become the masters (such as the Aztecs) and vice versa, developing their own justifications why it happened. | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | > In other words, animal and human muscle, we agree on that. Sure. My objection is to the slavery bit, not the "humans doing work" bit. > But the paid professions tended to be the skilled ones, and the non-free ones tended to be the arduous, backbreaking ones. There were plenty of non-slave manual laborers throughout history. Doubly so for chattel slavery of the sort practiced in the South. > Elsewhere where? If I look at the timeline of slavery abolition on Wikipedia, it seems that the South was not even the last holdout in the Americas, much less worldwide. What we'd now call the developed world. That article lists many restrictions and abolitions of the practices hundreds of years prior to the 1860s. The Russians you mention managed it in 1723; Massachusets deems it unconstitional in 1783. By the 1860s still having it as a properous nation was pretty weird. | | |
| ▲ | cyberax 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | > The Russians you mention managed it in 1723 In 1861. | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | The link lists this in 1723: > Peter the Great converts all house slaves into house serfs, effectively making slavery illegal in Russia. 1861 ditches serfdom, too. |
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| ▲ | inglor_cz 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | "What we'd now call the developed world." The developed world of now is much more extensive than the developed world of the 1860s, and the South was very backward until the 1950s or so. In the 1850s, it was seriously lagging behind the North in industrial power, which is one of the reasons why they lost the war. This would point to a yet another chicken-and-egg problem. Nonfree labour tends to cement premodern societal and economic structures, which perpetuate existence of non-free labour, unless disrupted from the outside. The Islamic world didn't give up slavery voluntarily either. I am not sure if we can call the South of the 1860s "developed", even relatively to the rest of the Western civ. By what criteria? "The Russians you mention managed it in 1723" Serfdom in Russia was abolished after the Crimean War, and the Tsar used the money gained by the Alaska Purchase to pay off part of the due compensations to the nobles. Yes, these institutions were not equal. Different cultural and historical development. Still, a Russian serf of the 1850s was a very non-free person, tied to the land and dependent on whims of his lord or lady. Few would care if a drunk noble whipped him to death, even though theoretically he should not be doing that. A rough equivalent in category. |
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| ▲ | Forgeties79 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Like trying to assess the economy of the Third Reich while omitting that whole pesky war thing |
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| ▲ | QuercusMax 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | They used slave labor too, don't forget! | | |
| ▲ | inglor_cz 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Slave labor is most efficient when it comes to non-skilled, hard work. Mining, agriculture, sex (where it still survives even in the Western world), where the output is easily checked and counted. When it comes to anything sophisticated done by qualified people, like "making advanced tools for the Führer", the options for subtle sabotage are there and pissed-off people will use them. In general, German occupation authorities had better results when they actually paid the workers and gave them vacation vouchers. But of course the racial theories got in the way, as it was unthinkable to treat, say, Jews as normal employees. | | |
| ▲ | 05 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Counterpoint: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharashka | | |
| ▲ | inglor_cz 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | Sure you can stuff smart people into penal colonies, but what is their productivity? I am not aware of anyone like Kapica or Kolmogorov producing their best results in a penal camp. OTOH we have a notorious railway tunnel in Prague from the 1950s, designed by imprisoned engineers. Guess what, it is half a foot too narrow to put two tracks into. Someone got the last laugh. | | |
| ▲ | embedding-shape an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | Does it matter what their productivity is as long as it's above 0 of whatever? Leon Theremin invented the "Buran eavesdropping system" while "working" at the sharashka, used to spy on embassies in Moscow via their windows. Another fun anecdote related to Theremin: > Theremin invented another listening device called The Thing, hidden in a replica of the Great Seal of the United States carved in wood. In 1945, Soviet school children presented the concealed bug to the U.S. Ambassador as a "gesture of friendship" to the USSR's World War II ally. It hung in the ambassador’s residential office in Moscow and intercepted confidential conversations there during the first seven years of the Cold War, until it was accidentally discovered in 1952. Interesting life in general: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leon_Theremin | |
| ▲ | an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | [deleted] |
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| ▲ | ceejayoz 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > Slave labor is most efficient when it comes to non-skilled, hard work. And yet, we invent things like the cotton gin, "enabling much greater productivity than manual cotton separation", patented in 1794. | | |
| ▲ | aaronbrethorst 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | I’m not entirely sure what point you’re trying to make. The invention of the cotton gin increased the use of slaves; it didn’t decrease it. https://freedomcenter.org/voice/eli-whitney-cotton-gin/ | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz an hour ago | parent [-] | | > The invention of the cotton gin increased the use of slaves; it didn’t decrease it. Because the efficiency increase in that part of the process meant we could grow so much more cotton to be processed. It wasn't very profitable before that, because slave labor wasn't very efficient at the process. (This led, eventually, to more automation of the planting/harvesting process.) | | |
| ▲ | aaronbrethorst an hour ago | parent [-] | | Clearly, you are much more clever than I am because I still have no idea what your thesis is supposed to be. | | |
| ▲ | ceejayoz an hour ago | parent [-] | | Thesis: Slavery is a morally unacceptable crutch that leads to stagnation over innovation in the long run. |
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