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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?
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.
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.
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