Those pesky moral principles are also getting in the way of growth. If you want real growth, force people to work for you for free. If they stop working you can always sell their organs.
Countries with free labor bury slave economies. Every time.
I see the notion that slaves are more productive than free labor all the time. What is missing is any evidence of it.
For an example, the US initially divided itself into two countries - North and South, free labor and slave labor. Guess which one economically and then militarily buried the other. For another, Korea divided into two countries. One buried the other economically. Germany split in two. The free one buried the slave one.
How much more evidence do you need?
It's estimated "that emancipation generated aggregate economic gains worth the equivalent of a 4% to 35% increase in US aggregate productivity" [1]. To look at the slave economies favourably, you have to exclude slaves from per-capita measures of productivity [2].
That said, Southern farms were more efficient than Northern ones. Not because they used slaves. But because they embraced economies of scale.
[1] https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/one-giant-...
[2] https://faculty.weber.edu/kmackay/economics%20of%20slavery.a...
I don't believe it. Evidence: they couldn't feed the Confederate army.
You can't feed an army with cotton, tobacco and sugarcane, the "main prewar agricultural products of the Confederate States" [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Confederate_Sta...
BTW, the reason the South seceded was to protect itself from the Northern market economy.
The slave economy was also unable to supply its army with shoes, uniforms, guns, cannons, powder, etc. The reason General Lee was at Gettysburg is because he was marching towards Harrisburg, which had a shoe factory he wanted to loot to shoe his barefoot army.
They started. But as the article mentions, that happened amidst a drought and the beginning of the war, which destroyed distribution.
> slave economy was also unable to supply its army with shoes, uniforms, guns, cannons, powder, etc.
Sure. Not arguing for the strength of the Southern economy. Just pointing out that their farms were more efficient. But not because of slaves. Because of the thing this article is about.
They had trouble with feeding the people because Southern policy to deter the war (Cotton is King speech) was to stop the cultivation of cotton. The CSA decreed that all the cash croppers convert to food farming. This did not work very well, they self-collapsed their own economy, and the hoped for British intervention never happened.
That summary is overly simplistic. Northern textile mills did not get their cotton from free labor.
Also, "From an economical standpoint, the emancipation in the West Indies and the general abolishment of slavery was a failure for Britain", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Cotton .
Opinions of course differ: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade#Effects_o...
The US has non-free labor in the form of penal labor supplying some $10 billion in goods and services. Last I checked it was not being buried by countries with only free labor.
The North continued to prosper after the war, and their economy was not based on textiles. They also imported Egyptian cotton.
Just like how England didn't have slavery in the 1700s, but the English still profited from slavery elsewhere in the British Empire.
Surely you know there's a long history of Yankees taught that they were on the good side, because they didn't want anything to do with slavery, because that's the more comfortable history to teach, rather than the real history of how many Yankees profited off of slave-made goods, just like those English not-so-gentle-men still honored today whose wealth was built on the backs of black slaves.
Surely you are also aware that apologists for the treasonous Confederacy say the Union should have just waited a few decades for slavery to reach its natural dead end, rather having all those poor white boys die for a few black folk.
Given that knowledge, please try to not sound like a supporter of either false narrative.
That seems a bit light as sources go and I suggest someone is misinterpreting the data. The slave owners are obviously going to be worse off in the short term. They used to have slaves, now they have to do the work themselves or pay for it. That much is pretty straightforward to see.
The issue is the slave owners are stuck in a local maximum where their society will be overwhelmed by the superior productivity of non-slave owning societies. There is a reason that none of the economic majors today are interested in re-instituting slavery - it is inefficient. The sort of thing you wish upon your enemies so that they can't challenge you. You'll note that after avoiding emancipation because of economic fears ... the economy of the South was then beaten up much worse than what happened to Britain! Which is what exactly what we'd expect to happen to the sort of state that commits to a system of slavery in a big way. It isn't going to be able to maintain a military edge.
The British government didn't pay off that debt until 2015.
While it sounds like you think the slave owners didn't get enough short-term compensation?
And don't just sob over the slavers. If the former slaves had gotten real and effective compensation, it would have been even more an economical failure for Britain.
> re-instituting slavery - it is inefficient
Please note that there are many types of non-free labor besides chattel slavery. I consider the penal labor system in the US a legalized form of slavery, while there are many who support it.
Nor were the British slaves only young men.
The size of the US economy is $29 trillion. $10 billion does not define it.
But people will discuss endlessly about what direction the causation goes.