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Notes -
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:
[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?
Blacks who were freed before the civil war were either freed by their masters or freed themselves via escape.
if freed by their master's this was down to 1 of 2 selection effects. Either they were intelligent and enterprising enough to become skilled and bargain a sum of money they could earn and pay for their freedom, or their master was sentimentally disposed towards them, quite possibly because they were his illegitimate offspring.
Indeed we see an overlap of these selection effects in escaped slaves. Frederick Douglas (an escaped slave) speculated himself that he was the son of his master, and implied this was common knowledge amongst the adult slave of the plantation he grew up on.
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The hypothesis that absolutely everything is biologically heritable and informed by such biology, and nurture is completely discredited remains very very difficult to challenge.
If conditions were the cause of the discrepancy we'd expect a change as large as literal slavery vs literal freedom to account for the major difference and the gap to close as soon as that difference was gone.
If something like intelligence or heritable traits were to blame, then we'd expect changing the conditions via external forces (the union army) to not really alter the positional gap.
Otherwise we wouldn't expect a mere 10-20 year gap in date of liberation to make that big an impact 7-9 generations later
It seems like the right way to check this would be to find a series of black families that maintain their genealogy back to before the civil war, and see if they’re doing better today depending on the circumstances of their freedom.
I’m rather doubting you can find tons of these people, and even if you could, it sounds like a lot of work to do all that.
Isn't that exactly the study Scott commented on? Those freed before the war (possibly due to factors particular to themselves as GP mentioned) are doing better today than those freed slightly later by external factors (the war).
I meant checking on the family lines of pre-civil war freemen and comparing them to means of obtaining freedom. It’s my understanding that some of these people still constitute distinct groups in EG New Orleans.
They did; there wasn't a difference between "freed before the war" and "slave until general emancipation" in the south. The difference was entirely location-based.
Ah, thank you for clarifying.
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