alt Hacker NewsEverything you’ve described sounds economic, not cultural. Being able to lounge around while others toil for your gain is absolutely economic. And the data shows this: if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita than the north.
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> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita than the north.
In other words, if you remove the people that earned the least (close to nothing) the overall income per capita goes up? If you exclude the non nobles I am sure the middle ages had a very high GDP too
> Being able to lounge around while others toil for your gain is absolutely economic.
And being comfortable doing it via slave labor is cultural.
> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita
If you exclude the murders, Ted Bundy was a really nice guy.
> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita than the north.
That doesn't tell the whole story though. If you own 100 slaves, you need to spend nonzero resources maintaining them, or else they will starve and then you have zero slaves. So the owner has less wealth than the equivalent person in the North that has the same income but zero slaves. You can't directly compare GDP per capita excluding enslaved people.
I do agree with your broader point about usage of labor and how being able to have leisure via slavery is economic.
There is certainly a cultural component. A very good book named Albion’s Seed traces the waves of early American immigration. The North was mostly settled by dissidents pre-ECW. The South was mostly divided up into estates and settled by post-ECW lords that mirrored the social structure and power dynamics they liked.
> …if you exclude the enslaved…
If you ignore the part that makes you wrong, then you are right.
> if you exclude the enslaved, the south had a higher GDP per capita
Yeah because your "capita" is severely undercounted.
If I exclude every who dont live in New York, USA has astonishing GDP per capita ... because I am assigning each person production of many. Same thing.
If you own a lot of slaves your life is better than the freemen who own less/none, much less slaves. However society overall could be muca better even if for you personally it is worse
Maybe - a lot of the material wealth of the South was having a lot of land divided amongst fewer people. Enjoying more leisure has a nasty habit of not making people richer in the end.
Here's specifically what Adam Smith had to say in the Wealth of Nations:
> But if great improvements are seldom to be expected from great proprietors, they are least of all to be expected when they employ slaves for their workmen. The experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance can be squeezed out of him by violence only, and not by any interest of his own.
Later, to explain this trap of why people insist on owning slaves even if paying workers would be more productive in the long run:
> "The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen."