Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> Yes, this is the economic assumption - folks are greedy and will exploit undervalued resources.

Except that's not what history shows us. Economics didn't free the slaves. Guns did. Economics didn't end segregation in housing and education. Bitter, expensive litigation did.[1] Economics didn't make gay marriage legal. Waging a cultural war on homophobes until it became social suicide in most circles to be one did that.

[1] And guns when people defied the court judgments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkansas_National_Guard_and_th....

View on HN

> Economics didn't make gay marriage legal. Waging a cultural war on homophobes until it became social suicide in most circles to be one did that.

And even that movement began with drag queens throwing bricks at cops.[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stonewall_riots

Economics did end segregation of Asians, Irish, Italians and Jews. Again, the fact that some groups have been violently unbent does not mean that groups can't unbend themselves. Just because you can cite other examples doesn't mean that the ones I cited don't exist.

Incidentally, you are aware that Jim Crow laws were mainly about economic protectionism, right? Raising wages for (white) workers by using guns against the competition. Folks at the time were well aware that greedy employers might tolerate black as long as it came with extra green. In fact, all your examples live outside the realm of greedy economic actors interacting via voluntary trade, so I really don't get the relevance at all.

These positive claims, whether they are accurate or not, regarding economics, segregation, and oppressed minorities are all fine and dandy in an abstract world. What are your takeaways from such arguments? Is it something along the lines of: "Since all of these other groups managed to unbend themselves when the economic factors were right, we (society as a whole/at large) should wait for other oppressed groups do the same?"

I've made no normative arguments here.

To amend yours, one such normative claim might be: "Since all of these other groups managed to unbend themselves when the economic factors were right, we (society as a whole/at large) should figure out how the groups (or treatment thereof) which didn't unbend themselves differ from those that did."

Most countries around the world abolished slavery peacefully.

> Most countries around the world abolished slavery peacefully.

[citation needed]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_slavery_timeline

From a quick skim, the US and Haiti seem to be the only non-peaceful abolitions out of hundreds.

This is a weird lens to look at slavery through. The circumstances in the US were unique: intense economic coupling to slavery, very large regional identity defined by slavery, &c.

More importantly, I'm not sure what this has to do with Rayiner's point. The realization that many plantation slaves would be better utilized as doctors and lawyers did not free the slaves, nor did economic competition from non-slaveholding plantations. It did, in fact, require coercion.

IMO the blame lies at least partly on American hyper-competitive mentality, where you have people on both sides willing to go to war over slavery, or "wage cultural war on homophobes" today. My link was intended to show that not all countries are like that.

I just can't agree with Rayiner that we should escalate more because the current conflict is all-important. Game theory tells us that if everyone thinks that way, society loses. And game theory offers a way out: you need a shared culture that enables de-escalation without losing face. Conflicts would still get resolved, but without wasting tons of resources on both sides. Many countries have that.

That's the first time I've heard the Civil War ascribed to Americans being too competitive. Every day I learn new things on this site.

> intense economic coupling to slavery, very large regional identity defined by slavery, &c

If we wish this to be relevant to the current discussion: do you think the US has intense economic coupling to few-women-in-tech? Large regional identity defined by few-women-in-tech?

> It did, in fact, require coercion.

In a minority of instances, it was achieved through coercion. That doesn't mean coercion was the only way it was ever going to happen in those instances.

And when someone says "it took guns, not economics" then it seems entirely to the point that guns were only involved in a minority of instances. I'm not sure how you can not think this is relevant to what Rayiner was saying.

just to add, some writers distinguish between societies where slavery existed (almost every human society) and "slave societies", where "the definition of the relationship between ownership and labor -- is defined by slavery". (see: http://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/2011/09/the-slav...)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com