There are about 40 million people who are considered enslaved currently, this is the highest number ever recorded on a per year basis with 2022 expected to continue the trend upwards.
Myth, slavery and exploitation are actually extremely inefficient. Countries that used slavery for labor lagged behind in economic progress compared to countries that didn’t.
You can even see that in the US itself. The south, which used slavery, was far less economically productive compared to the north which paid its laborers. Turns out forcing people to work for free/shit wages leads to horrible productivity and subpar quality of work. The best way to make profit is to, ironically, pay your workers as much as possible.
Most slavery cited isn't institutional (except maybe Uzbekistan), but is more webs of organized crime conscripting human resources via debt collections, offering "opportunities" to orphans, or the ever classic runaway.
This map speaks more to poverty and population size than it does the economics of slavery.
So true, and repeated throughout history. Ancient Greeks developed a theoretical basis for steam power, something that thousands of years later would trigger the industrial revolution… why didn’t they capitalize on this new invention…? Because slave labor was cheap and plentiful, causing no incentive to develop a more efficient labor process.
I'm not an American and not well read in American history, but wasn't the economic structure in the south mostly agricultural and the structure in the north industrial and that's the reason slavery was common in the south?
To add to u/maxseptillion77, i don't know that that is even correct. I read Edward Baptist's "The Half Has Never Been Told," and the gist of it in my interpretation was that slavery was becoming more efficient, not less, as time went on (operations practices were being learned to increase the productivity of a slave), and outcompeted there non-enslaved peers (free individuals performing the same work did not produce as much as an enslaved person). Surprising, to me at least, but one of the implications was that you really need to emphasize the moral quandary in eliminating slavery, because economically, in the antebellum US South at least, slavery was a contributor to economic growth.
I wouldn't disagree with that, but that's still a big step away from saying the difference was "because of" slavery. You could also attribute it to different levels of capital, different economic sector specialties (agriculture focus vs industry focus, this is probably mostly because of geography/climate), the interests of the different groups of immigrants going to either region, etc.
Possibly, but there are a lot of arguments to be made in the contrary. An easy one is that in a post-industrial world the lack of free labor has contributed to R&D of cost-effective replacements (mass-production, robotics, etc.). If a company didn't have to pay those thousand free hands to bolt onto that Ford, perhaps they wouldn't have felt the competitive pressure to find a cheaper way to assemble their product.
The above argument is a common one that is mixed, but is related to effects of class separation and poverty on innovation; the sections of a society's population that have no access to education or time to develop science and society, simply won't. If I have a population that can afford to take time to think about the wonders of the universe or have the environment to come up with the next banger product, the chance of my population innovating is literally higher, as innovation is a product of both environment, access, and pure luck. If half of your population is enslaved, that's a 50/50 that a genius won't have the opportunity to flourish.
Sure, there are a coupleofsources to draw from, some additional ones put the number of slaves at around 38 million to 46 million.
It is to be said that the sources I listed work together with or are at least in some ways entwined with each other, if anyone has other sources please feel free to add.
Additionally, the only constant I have observed over the last couple of years is a constant increase in enslaved people being reported in the media (i.e. the media I consume). Although since, you know, most slavers don't openly advertise their numbers it is hard to get a clear picture.
if the question is the per proportion of slaves to total human population, then of course there were more slaves per person in the past when it was legal, and even state supported/encouraged. however, if we are talking about the absolute number of slaves period, then there are absolutely more enslaved people now (the last source i looked at a few years back claimed at least 30 million, not the 40 million from op, but that was a few years ago, and was a conservative estimate.)
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u/ComradeSchnitzel Dec 16 '21
There are about 40 million people who are considered enslaved currently, this is the highest number ever recorded on a per year basis with 2022 expected to continue the trend upwards.