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Even during slavery, African Americans had the highest literacy rate of any SSA group. They had a greater attainment of complex skills as a consequence of being skilled slaved and/or freed in the North. How do you reason that it’s possible for slavery to cause black underperformance, when we know that their skill level was worse before slavery? Lastly, if I enslaved you to work all day and inflicted corporal punishment whenever you misbehaved, and I did this for a decade, do you think after the decade you would be a better or worse worker? When a slave from the south was freed in the north and went on to work a productive life as a blacksmith (or something), what caused him to be unhindered from slavery that hindered the others?
I would expect a worse worker. You have removed internal motivation.
But Indian and East Asian authoritarian/disciplinarian parenting styles — at their most extreme — result in physical punishment and shaming without regard for “internal motivation”. Yet this produces the highest performing capitalist worker bee cohort. Marine training is also externally-focused, yet military science tells us this produces good soldiers and common wisdom tells us this results in disciplined young men after service. Having food to eat and a roof over your head is also intrinsically motivating as is, we are talking about the late 19th and early 20th century where there is no welfare state, but in the case of slaves their habits are optimized for productivity.
Internal motivation is probably a meme concept. Do we mean, “has the skill of foreseeing the positive versus negative consequences of their current behavior?” This is instilled by slavery, where reneging of daily duty results in salient physical punishment, and fulfilling the duty in abundance may result in greater rewards. The difference post-slavery is that the foreseeing of reward/punishment is applied only to money and the consequences of money, so it is a little more delayed in consequence, but it’s the same neural circuitry.
I'm pretty sure they are still associated with considerably more internal motivation than slavery.
Well, why do you think so?
Because slavery is done for the interests of the slaveowner and at least in theory, authoritarian parents are acting for the long term benefit of the children. And even callous authoritarian parents are not going to be as callous as slaveowners.
Kids are not, generally, capable of understanding the distinction.
Reproduction is done for the interests of the parent.
No, I think they understand the distinction perfectly (in that there is none). "Slavery" might be a loaded term (parents and adults more generally will take reflexive offense to children calling it this, even if you ignored that it's an insult to their legitimacy on its face because it is loaded, something children also are well aware of), but in their defense it is a perfectly accurate description of the situation.
[Mistake-theory description of biological reality below]
Children are, by their nature, property; something they have in common with women. Scalable primary resource extraction is difficult to impossible to establish for them. Thus, sons work for you until they become too large to physically dominate (which is the definition of "adulthood" for men), daughters you sell at physical maturity (the definition of "adulthood" for women) to the highest bidder (they're a net loss otherwise), and your wife is such a purchase.
Now, this isn't to say that some fathers treat that property very well- as if they didn't own it, almost (and property that has 2 legs needs to be motivated pretty strongly to stick around; you can do that through love or fear, fear is easier and always your fallback option as a father but it's less productive in the long run so generally worth putting in the effort to not do that)- but that doesn't make the balance of power any different and selfishness on the part of the parent (or the surrounding society- like Asian nations and their ludicrous education systems, or certain US states where the State will punish you if you're let outside) will always push that balance towards fear.
Really, at the end of the day, we're just haggling over the price. For example, something that can break this reality is if scalable primary resource extraction in terms of a man's body is completely obviated by mechanization/technology/market forces- if that happens, the bride price goes to infinity, and with that men can no longer meaningfully own women. This happened to children at the same time for the same reasons, so you had a lot of effectively-emancipated "teenagers"... until the Great Depression put a so-far-permanent end to that (with a slight rebound for them around the '60s).
Chains that set lightly upon you are still chains; what harm does noticing them do?
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Why would the knowledge that a parent has been acting for longterm benefit increase a person’s internal motivation regarding longterm planning and delayed gratification?
But there are no shortage of high performing Asians who genuinely feel that their parents were callous in their adolescence, showing no love, driving them like a slave.
When they say they were driven like a slave that's metaphorical. It isn't actually the same thing as being driven like a real slave.
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