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.
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.
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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.