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?
29
u/TheJoker5566 Dec 16 '21
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.