In his usual sleight-of-hand manner, Noam Chomsky was fond of dismissing economic growth as a measure of progress by pointing out that the the relative prosperity of slaves increased in the US* before the Civil War, but we wouldn't call slavery a good system, would we?
No, but it's a hell of a good argument for free trade. If you are by definition at the bottom of a society where no one cares about your interests much, treats you horribly, and you have no control over your economic destiny, and your prosperity still increases, something must be going right somewhere, even if little of it is coming to you.
*As the slaves arriving after 1800 went to some of the worst conditions on cotton plantations, I'm not sure exactly what data Chomsky was using. You'd think they would bring down the average pretty severely.
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Clever, wise, mendacious - one of the tougher conundrums.
So, the problem that rises to my mind on reading that is that rising prosperity for slaves was not an ordinary feature, it was unique to the American South. Most of the slaves brought from Africa to the New World went to Latin America, where most of them died. An organic increase in the population was, as far as I know, unique to the United States.
And that happened not because of free trade, but in large part because they cut off the slave trade at the earliest possible Constitutional moment. Thus, a natural increase was the main way to obtain new slaves. Therefore, it would be as reasonable to argue from this data that protectionism and regulation ensured that the native labor (though unfree) was treated as a valuable resource to be cared for and nurtured.
Ah, excellent angle.
Chomsky was being Chomsky.
Grim
An organic increase in the [slave] population was, as far as I know, unique to the United States.
Facts about the Slave Trade and Slavery
Well over 90 percent of enslaved Africans were imported into the Caribbean and South America. Only about 6 percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America. Yet by 1825, the US had a quarter of blacks in the New World.
In the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana, and Brazil, the slave death rate was so high and the birth rate so low that they could not sustain their population without importations from Africa. Rates of natural decrease ran as high as 5 percent a year. While the death rate of US slaves was about the same as that of Jamaican slaves, the fertility rate was more than 80 percent higher in the United States.
US slaves were more generations removed from Africa than those in the Caribbean. In the nineteenth century, the majority of slaves in the British Caribbean and Brazil were born in Africa. In contrast, by 1850, most US slaves were third-, fourth-, or fifth generation Americans.
Slavery in the US was distinctive in the near balance of the sexes and the ability of the slave population to increase its numbers by natural reproduction. Unlike any other slave society, the US had a high and sustained natural increase in the slave population for a more than a century and a half.
Yup.
Grim
An organic increase in the [slave] population was, as far as I know, unique to the United States.
Facts about the Slave Trade and Slavery
Well over 90 percent of enslaved Africans were imported into the Caribbean and South America. Only about 6 percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America. Yet by 1825, the US had a quarter of blacks in the New World.
In the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana, and Brazil, the slave death rate was so high and the birth rate so low that they could not sustain their population without importations from Africa. Rates of natural decrease ran as high as 5 percent a year. While the death rate of US slaves was about the same as that of Jamaican slaves, the fertility rate was more than 80 percent higher in the United States.
US slaves were more generations removed from Africa than those in the Caribbean. In the nineteenth century, the majority of slaves in the British Caribbean and Brazil were born in Africa. In contrast, by 1850, most US slaves were third-, fourth-, or fifth generation Americans.
Slavery in the US was distinctive in the near balance of the sexes and the ability of the slave population to increase its numbers by natural reproduction. Unlike any other slave society, the US had a high and sustained natural increase in the slave population for a more than a century and a half.
Yup.
Roll, Jordan, Roll, The World the Slaves Made by Eugene Genovese. I thought it a very interesting book. Slaves struggled mightily to convert the benevolent "gifts" or "privileges" bestowed upon them by their masters into customary rights that masters would not violate. The reciprocity of paternalism could work to the slaves' advantage by allowing them to demand more humane treatment from their masters. Religion was an important theme in Roll, Jordan, Roll and other studies.
There's an odd trend in both religious and economic writing: a deep ambivalence about poverty and wealth. We're neither to value wealth in ourselves nor tolerate poverty in others; it's both good and bad to want more material prosperity, and a system to reliably increases it is simultaneously helping and corrupting us.
It's true that you can't justify slavery by pointing out that it increased material prosperity even for the slaves. But what's obviously wrong with slavery is not that it's not a good path for economic prosperity for slaves; it was never intended to be any such thing. At best, it may accidentally have increased material prosperity for slaves, a plus that scarcely made up for the many minuses in terms of human degradation.
The free market actually is intended to maximize prosperity, and does so. It's not intended to minimize inequality in income, or enoble mankind, or ensure that people act against their narrow self-interest to sacrifice for others, for the environment, for God, etc. The free market may or may not do at least as little harm in those areas as, say socialism; I'd argue that it does. But the free market isn't aimed at those ends. It's aimed at maximizing the utility of a lot of distributed decisions among large groups of strangers interacting at considerable distance. "Utility" is whatever that mass of people coheres around, which may be right or wrong. The only guarantee is that a free market will more accurately reflect what people actually want than will any centralized system we've ever developed. If people want the wrong things, that's a different problem. Centralized authorities can--and generally do--want the wrong things, too. There aren't any saintly experts we can hand the decisions to who will magically avoid all the wrong decisions.
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