1. Ezra's Thesis
Ezra Klein on the compound interest of slavery
it's relatively easy for people to think in terms of the compound interest that's accrued to the income stolen from African Americans. But the power of compound interest doesn't just apply to money. It also applies to education and families and neighborhoods and self-respect. And this is where Coates' piece is so devastating. America didn't just plunder what African-Americans earned, or what they had saved. By far the hardest part of the piece to read was this account of what slavery did to black families:
It's as simple and clear as a child's math problem. The people who benefited most from American racism weren't the white men who stole the penny. It's the people who held onto the penny while it doubled and doubled and doubled and doubled.
2. Cowen's Criticism
Also, while it is at least controversial whether slavery was a profitable institution, even if it was it wasn't like the gains to whites were mirror images of the losses to slaves.
One last point by Tyler is that empirically, it doesn't seem like slavery-heavy regions have had especially impressive per capita incomes.
Tyler Cowen focus's in on the wealth aspect, but Ezra Klein also said it applies to education, families, neighborhoods, and self respect. This seems like kind of a floaty, wishy-washy, argument that a better writer than logician would make. I would like to hear the details of how exactly self-respect is supposed to compound interest.
With things like education where every new generation must start from scratch (every baby is a new brain to fill), it's hard to see how it compounds. Maybe parents have more to teach their children, but that explanation omits the exponential factor of compound interest. Maybe your parents teach you 5 lessons that they've learned over their lifetime, you add 2 things, and now you have 7 to teach your children. But that's not like compound interest at all. That's just addition.
Empirically, is there really much reason to believe children are taking what their parents taught them and adding to it? I'm skeptical
3. SlateStar's Criticism
SlateStar also resists Ezra's idea that slavery is like compound interest. He says we should look at whether formerly slave-owning societies are richer than formerly non-slave-owning societies. And that much of the reason wealth persists over generation isn't the inherited money, but the inherited genes. He says,
we would need to randomly select a bunch of people, give them a lot of wealth, and follow them for a couple of generations to see whether their descendants compounded that advantage or regressed back to their genetically programmed level.He cites studies that look at exactly this. One is an interesting natural experiment where Georgia lotteried away large fertile farms in the 1800s, and a couple generations down the line were no better off because of it.
And then we have studies of modern day lottery winners, and it doesn't seem like their grandkids are better off either.
I should note that both Slatestar's links are broken. The post is from 2014 after all. I would like to re-discover these studies.
4. More to say
It's all well and good to say, 'if you had taken $1 white slave owners gained and put it in a bank account it would be worth a zillion dollars today.' But that didn't happen. So I don't think it's okay to act like whites all inherited some great fortune from their great great great great grandparents, when most of them clearly didn't.
Normal people are repulsed by the idea of inherited debt, and I think it keeps this reparations thing from gaining any sort of traction. Even if we look at a single generation: if your dad owes my dad $100 but then dies before he pays up, you don't owe me anything. But some liberals want to go back to distant generations to assess which debts are inherited to which groups of people.
This is strange to me. It seems like closer proximity ancestors are much closer to who I am and what I'm responsible for than ancestors I've never even met. We also have a whole lot more information, and allows us to be more precise about who owes who what.
For some reason they only want to go back to slavery, and never pre-slavery. Because before slavery we had to import slaves, and we know that frequently the modern off-spring of slaves have much higher wealth as a result of their ancestors being imported from, say, Congo.
Suppose you were waiting to be born, and an angel offered you to be born in one of two lives. One where your great great great great great grandfather was imported to America as a slave, or one where he remained in West Africa? From a purely selfish standpoint, which one would you choose? It shouldn't be a hard decision.
I say, "some reason", but it's not a mystery. The argument I give above is disgusting, especially to liberals. To think that slavery could have benefited the great great great grandchildren of it's victims! I guess you're just going to have to decide how you're willing to stray from your comfort zone when thinking about these kinds of things.
So looking at the whole matter again, what I find so intellectually disingenuous is the insistence of inherited debt only for these two groups of people (whites, blacks, and sometimes natives), and only for this one thing that happened (slavery / taking of native land). There are a million other ways to cut up human diversity and a million other time frames, but none of them are mentioned. I think it's because liberals sacralize these victim groups in particular.
