4 ms·
> Humans are simply inefficient at farming compared to machines, and slavery served to artificially decrease the cost of human labor to the point that machines
by disown 6y ago
> Humans are simply inefficient at farming compared to machines, and slavery served to artificially decrease the cost of human labor to the point that machines and automation processes could never compete.
In other words, human labor was cheaper and more efficient? What you wrote implies the exact opposite of what you are trying to claim.
> Slavery was a disaster for US economic progress.
Now this is a historical/economic lie. If slavery was a disaster for the US, the US wouldn't have become an economic giant during slavery. Certainly, slavery wasn't a disaster for US economic progress since we progressed by leaps and bounds. The fastest growing major economy in the world during slavery. You could argue that automation would have led to greater economic progress, but to say it was an economic disaster is simply a lie.
> Without slavery, automation would've happened much sooner and by now we'd likely have fully autonomous farming (we're only partially to that stage).
Or automation wouldn't have happened at all since slavery provided cheap labor which provided cheap raw materials to power the industrial north which created surplus capital which led to investment, so on. So without the excesss capital from slavery, there is no investment towards automation.
You are conveniently ignoring the alternative that without slavery, it is possible that US economic growth would have declined and automation would have been delayed even further. You don't have automation without excess capital/investment. Slavery was a major source of excess capital along with capital from chinese opium trade and theft of native land/resource in the first half of the 19th century. Without capital, there is no industrialization after all.
- 0xy 6y ago>If slavery was a disaster for the US, the US wouldn't have become an economic giant during slavery Nope, I said it was a disaster for progress. That doesn't preclude it from becoming an economic giant. My claim is that slavery held back US progress to a large margin. This does not mean the US did not progress at all. That's a strawman. >human labor was cheaper and more efficient It was cheaper, but it caused investments in automation to not take place. Automation is orders of magnitude more efficient. >So without the excesss capital from slavery, there is no investment towards automation. This doesn't explain how progress is made today without the need for slavery, even in loss-making industries. >Slavery was a major source of excess capital This doesn't disprove my point, at all. My claim is that automation produces orders of magnitude more capital.