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Comment by krapht | Hacker News Reader

> 6. One cannot overstate the importance of slavery to American economic development and power.

Doubt. The economic decline of the American south was well on its way by the 19th century. That some prisoners today make license plates has no material affect on US GDP - this claim needs sources.

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There’s a parallel in beasts of burden. Do some smallholders use them? Yes. Are they economical? No. Mechanization undercut the value proposition of slave labor and beasts of burden due to the costs of upkeep and their nature of needing rest and recuperation. With slaves you also had to have a an infrastructure to keep them from escaping -also true for animals but keeping animals corralled is cheap.

Keeping slaves from escaping is simple: fear. You could be whipped or killed, you were unwelcome anywhere in society, and there were laws enforcing their capture and return. No infrastructure needed.

Slavery was wildly economically feasible, still is. All you need to do is add pressure to the workers and their performance increases. Like Amazon warehouse workers, but, you know, with whippings.

Fear wasn't the only tool --in China (the Qing Dynasty for example) it was socially ingrained that some people were destined to be slaves, this is probably the more successful approach, open to fewer questions or rebellions except when the lords overplay their hands and become cruel.

In 1800, the US was an agrarian backwater. By 1900 the US was an industrial superpower. Industrialization predominantly happened in the North. So you could argue that slavery was an impediment to growth but that ignores what happened in between and the secondary effects.

Specifically, the US built a massive cotton industry [1] that created an enormous amount of wealth and funded expansion of hte United States westward. Cheap labor was essential to that. Even partial mechanization (ie the cotton gin) actually just increased demand for slave labor because cotton became much cheaper as a result.

As for prison labor, the direct economic output of incarcerated persons is relatively small to overall GDP but, just like with slavery, you can't ignore the secondary effects, specifically in suppressing in wages.

[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/12/empire-...

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