| ▲ | margalabargala 3 hours ago | |||||||||||||||||||
> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita than the north. That doesn't tell the whole story though. If you own 100 slaves, you need to spend nonzero resources maintaining them, or else they will starve and then you have zero slaves. So the owner has less wealth than the equivalent person in the North that has the same income but zero slaves. You can't directly compare GDP per capita excluding enslaved people. I do agree with your broader point about usage of labor and how being able to have leisure via slavery is economic. | ||||||||||||||||||||
| ▲ | jmyeet 3 hours ago | parent [-] | |||||||||||||||||||
Except that slaves also make new slaves that can be sold. I really dislike this idea that slavery was just a cultural aberration and not economic. For one thing, that lightens the moral stain of slavery adjacent activity, most notably colonialism and the exploitation of the colonies. This never went away. Economic colonialism exists to this day. We just call it “outsourcing”, “offshoring” and “subcontracting”. | ||||||||||||||||||||
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