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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   27881 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 26, 2022

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In his latest link roundup, Scott links to (a pre-print?) of a paper claiming to show that "Black families who were enslaved until the Civil War continue to have considerably lower education, income, and wealth today than Black families who were free before the Civil War".

Here is Scott's commentary:

New study finds that black people whose ancestors were enslaved on the eve of the Civil War, compared to black people whose ancestors were free at the time, continue to have lower education/wealth/income even today. If true, this provides strong supports the ”cycle of poverty” story of racial inequality, and boosts the argument for reparations. But I’ve also seen studies say the opposite of this. I would be much more willing to accept the new study as an improvement on the old one if not for, well, things like the link above [1] - I have no evidence that anything like that was involved, but at this point it’s hard not to be paranoid. Does anyone know a good third-party commentary on this analysis?

[1] Here Scott talks about "the trend to bar scientists from accessing government datasets if their studies might get politically incorrect conclusions"

I'd be very interested in learning what you make of the study and how you think it links to Scott's conclusions. What evidence would it take to convince you that the "cycle of poverty" hypothesis is true / explains a large portion of the black/everyone else disparity across a number of different life outcomes?

I think the African slave trade largely traded on Africans who lost a political, legal or physical conflict in Africa -- they were (for the most part) prisoners of war, convicts, outcasts and misfits who were captured and sold to slavers by other native Africans. So this isn't terribly different from observing that descendants of convicted felons tend to have worse outcomes, which I also expect to be true. As is often the case in studies of intergenerational disparities, genetic heredity can provide a satisfying explanation, which is upstream both from their current status and their ancestors' enslavement.

It also seems plausible to me that slave breeding that took place in America was dysgenic, which could have long-lasting consequences. I don't know if it was, though. If that is correct, it's quite the political hot potato: the folks looking to avenge past oppression are generally not going to want to accept that genetic inferiority mediates the legacy of the oppression, and the folks looking to blame the underclass for their plight are generally not going to want to accept that their blameworthy tendencies were foisted upon them by the sins of America's forefathers.

Ya, but, hypothetically, wouldn't that selection have only existed among the pool of already available slaves.

So if there was selection it would only be among the pre-selected group (of tribes that got enslaved by other tribes, I guess)?

I don't see how your point disagrees with what the parent comment says. Sure there was selection, but that selection would be among a pre selected group, and said means of selection would have dysgenic effect.

Were African slavers in Africa American forefathers?

No, but the American slavers were, and deserve the lion's share of the credit for American slavery existing as an institution. There's plenty of supply for slavery in the third world; the bottleneck is always the more developed country tolerating it and building infrastructure to support it. In any event, it wasn't the African slavers who would have been responsible for dysgenic slave breeding within America.

A little bit of googling illustrates that the US was a very minor part of the international slave trade (about 2%). The largest destinations of slaves were Brazil (44%), British Caribbean (21%) and Spanish Americas (12%).

https://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates

If you're shipping 4M slaves to the Caribbean (British + French), shipping another 470k to the US was a sideshow. I find it implausible that eliminating the US market would meaningfully affect the infra, but eliminating the Caribbean market certainly might.

...How much more developed was America than the "third world" when slavery was established and developed? Compared to, say, the Ottomans? Or if colonial America isn't the correct reference, then Britain, France, etc, for the "developed country"?

Uh, "enough," perhaps? Colonial America was probably somewhere between uncolonized Africa and Continental Europe in terms of industrialization and urban development.

American colonies-interestingly, both in British and French North America, but not south of the rio grande- were noticeably wealthier than the mother country even way back when. This appears to be largely due to how land use regulations were written(to maximize owner-occupied farm productivity while leaving less room for tenant farming and sharecropping, and to give the peasants access to markets) with some selection effects in the mix.

the above was somewhat poorly worded, but if we're dating the introduction of chattel slavery to 1619, wasn't England a relative backwater, and America an extremely-sparsely populated colonial hinterland? Meanwhile the Ottomans were, if I'm not mistaken, a serious empire in their prime, and again if I'm not mistaken had been engaging in chattel slavery for much longer.

Even assuming 1619 as the introduction of chattel slavery(and that’s certainly disputable; chattel slavery didn’t become dominant until later and may not have been distinguished from indentured servitude in 1619), England was a major power and one of the wealthiest societies in the world then, not some kind of backwater.

I admit I'm not terribly clear on what parts of Europe looked like around the 1600's--like, did things still look all, well, medieval-y?

No, they didn't look medievally. Think ruffles, breeches, big floppy hats, rapiers, cannons and star forts. Think The Three Musketeers.

yeah, that was kinda my thinking as well. We think of the Ottomans as sort of backward and undeveloped, but 1600 is well before the industrial revolution; everywhere was "undeveloped" by modern standards. I guess the brits and Americans were put-together enough to set up ocean-going trade networks, but then again their whole society was sorta built around the shores of the Atlantic. Meanwhile, the Ottomans were ruling a vast empire and making the last of their repeated efforts to conquer a significant chunk of Europe.

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