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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   27880 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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I was going to post my analysis, but this guy already did a much more in-depth analysis than I have the patience for:

https://cremieux.substack.com/p/black-economic-progress-after-slavery

TL;DR: As noted in the abstract of the paper itself, the gap appears to be driven almost entirely by state of residence, with southern but not northern blacks having been exposed to Jim Crow (the main analysis is in 1940, and the extended analysis only goes through 2000). There's also likely some selection bias, with more productive slaves being more likely to be freed.

In short, this provides basically zero evidence for the effects of truly exogenous poverty persisting for more than a generation or two once the impoverishing forces are removed.

As I understand it, the general pattern was for lighter-skinned mulattos to be freed, in a way which swamps any tendency to free more productive slaves.

If you believe in hbd wouldn’t lighter skin mulattos by definition be on average higher productivity?

I've got a little epicycle of a theory that the whites who were messing around that way generally weren't of the highest quality (Thomas Jefferson perhaps excepted).

I wouldn’t necessarily expect that- AFAIK, overseers, skilled plantation workers, and other ‘poor whites’ with access to the slave population were mostly from the ambitious upper working class(which we should expect to be towards the top end in intelligence, if not necessarily geniuses), and the majority of mulattoes born in the antebellum south could trace their ancestry to master in some way(albeit as often through a son as to the master himself).

They would probably on average be higher intelligence, but that doesn’t necessarily equal higher productivity given that slaves were doing manual labor.

Macnamara's Folly showed that higher IQ soldiers were more effective than lower IQ ones, even at manual talks like loading shells in a mortar.

Even manual labour requires people to follow processes, learn from mistakes etc.

Slaves did all sorts of stuff. This guy was a contractor who managed construction crews building giant mansions:

https://www.destrehanplantation.org/history/the-building-of-a-plantation

Ironically his payment included a slave.

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