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> Ending slavery was extremely effective. Millions of people gained freedom and human rights overnight. The result was a vast improvement in their situation.

> Ending slavery was extremely effective. Millions of people gained freedom and human rights overnight. The result was a vast improvement in their situation. Yes, it was 'extremely effective' if you stop the clock on Jan 2, 1863, and don't look at what actually happened in the long run afterwards. People gained some basic freedom overnight, but that's only a small piece of what needed to be done, and that remaining part... never actually happened. So while it was a success in 1863, it was not a success in 1870, or 1900, or 2000, at which point the targets for 'success' were considerably higher. There was no plan for executing Reconstruction, no process for evaluating its success or failure, no strategy for providing the support needed to have it occur successfully. It was assumed that the initial step taken would solve all the problems, and that no additional incremental steps would need to be taken beyond that. > But your proposals for doing it better involve even more intervention! Yes, and in this case (abolition of slavery and the reintegration of freed slaves into society), more intervention is exactly what I'd advocate was necessary.

mikeash 11y ago
When you say it was "not a success" in 2000, do you mean that we'd have been better off in 2000 if slavery had not been abolished? If so, I'm going to need something to back that up, because I don't buy it at all. If not, and we were better off, then in what way was it "not a success"?
- chimeracoder 11y ago
  > When you say it was "not a success" in 2000, do you mean that we'd have been better off in 2000 if slavery had not been abolished? No, I'm saying that, 140 years after the end of slavery, "success" means more than "we no longer have 4 million people living as slaves". Success metrics aren't static; they're time-dependent, and it's not sufficient to say that what counted as "success" for a plan in 1863 is still "success" a century and a half later (or even a decade and a half later).
  - mikeash 11y ago
    I don't see the relevance, then. The comment I originally replied to was arguing against this sort of policy, not on the basis of what it proposes, but simply because it's too big and too centralized. They propose that policy-making should be incremental and evolutionary, or local. I use the abolition of slavery as a counterexample, since it was a huge centralized policy change that was a great improvement, where incremental, evolutionary, or local changes had failed to do anything meaningful. So unless you're saying that we'd have been better off without federal abolition of slavery, I don't see how your time-dependent "success" criteria has any bearing on this discussion. The argument I replied to wasn't that big sweeping policies need to be done right, it was that they need not to be done at all.

mikeash 11y ago

When you say it was "not a success" in 2000, do you mean that we'd have been better off in 2000 if slavery had not been abolished? If so, I'm going to need something to back that up, because I don't buy it at all. If not, and we were better off, then in what way was it "not a success"?

chimeracoder 11y ago
> When you say it was "not a success" in 2000, do you mean that we'd have been better off in 2000 if slavery had not been abolished? No, I'm saying that, 140 years after the end of slavery, "success" means more than "we no longer have 4 million people living as slaves". Success metrics aren't static; they're time-dependent, and it's not sufficient to say that what counted as "success" for a plan in 1863 is still "success" a century and a half later (or even a decade and a half later).
- mikeash 11y ago
  I don't see the relevance, then. The comment I originally replied to was arguing against this sort of policy, not on the basis of what it proposes, but simply because it's too big and too centralized. They propose that policy-making should be incremental and evolutionary, or local. I use the abolition of slavery as a counterexample, since it was a huge centralized policy change that was a great improvement, where incremental, evolutionary, or local changes had failed to do anything meaningful. So unless you're saying that we'd have been better off without federal abolition of slavery, I don't see how your time-dependent "success" criteria has any bearing on this discussion. The argument I replied to wasn't that big sweeping policies need to be done right, it was that they need not to be done at all.