How accurate is this concise history?
Well, we see the white guy never would have gotten to where he is without slavery. I’m not one of those people who think that slavery actually had negative effects on economic growth, some have made that case, but the idea that slavery was a necessary condition or a significant stimulant for growth is false. Pre-slavery and post-slavery growth rates are similar. We observe poor countries of today getting that first step into economic growth without slavery. We observe many poor countries staying poor with slavery. Those institutional and market institutions that strongly correlate with economic growth have nothing to do with slavery. The product that all the slaves were producing could have been, and later were produced without slavery by just paying market wages.
Second, we see that the white guy and the black guy are the same people. Nobody believes in the principle of inherited guilt when it comes to anything else. I don’t pay for the sins or debts of my father because we’re different people. Likewise, I’m not owed anything because of the oppression of my father because we’re different people.
What is accurate is that being black is correlated with lower economic success. When we ask the question why, I think the answer does have to do with inter-generational progress from a lower baseline. And that baseline stayed so low because of slavery rather than some inherent goodness in a race. What do we do about it?
If it was some kind of stock of wealth being inherited from generation to generation, then maybe it would be time to give some of it back. After all, the wealth was gained illegitimately in the first place. The problem though is that it is not a stock of wealth being inherited, but rather a stock of characteristics and qualities that generate wealth. The wealth itself from general economic growth has gone to everybody – no matter what race you are, you’re better off than you would be 50 or 100 years ago.
I don’t find the “white people are hoarding all the wealth” story plausible. The flow of income correlates with race as well as the stock of wealth. White people are getting paid more and we know that employers care about productivity. You might think that rich parents are buying their children education, which is making them more productive. But average years of education is only weakly correlated with that of adopted parents, and it is strongly correlated with that of genetic parents.
Another story you hear is employer racism. But to the extent that you believe that employers are paying a premium for race rather than productivity is exactly the extent that employers don’t care about profit. Some people come from a worldview where the only thing that the wealthy love more than money is racism, but at a certain point these people need to stop telling ghost stories to each other and dig up some reasons for their claims -- especially in this day-and-age.
Once you identify that why some races are poorer than others is because of qualities that earn income rather than because they’re inheriting a giant sack of wealth, then the solution no longer has anything to do with race. After all, poor people of all kinds have been cursed with a lack of income generating qualities. The affirmative action debate reverts to the general social policy of welfare debate.
That is a debate worth having.
