4 ms·
> 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
by 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 agoI 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.