[PEN-L:6040] Re: Re: Brad De Long on working hours

[Jim Devine <jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I took a brave stand, stating: >>I'm all in favor of freeing the slaves.<<

Then I adde:>>But it's not an unmixed blessing. In some places in the
Caribbean, I understand that the slave-owners freed their own slaves in
order to avoid the responsibility of keeping them alive.<<

Josh writes: >Some thought about the demographics of the Caribbean might
lead you to reconsider your example, if not your broader point. I don't
have any numbers in front of me (a condition of my exile here in DC is that
I only get to see my books on weekends) but I'm fairly sure that throughout
the region, life expectancies increased dramatically after emancipation,
and population growth rates changed from sharply negative to positive.<

I didn't say that the slaves got worse off due to freedom. In the US, the
case which I'm most familiar with, they definitely better off (at least in
the short run), as their work hours per year fell significantly (according
to Ransom & Sutch). My point was that the shift from slavery to freedom is
a mixed blessing. Some things -- like security -- are often lost.

My impression is that the places where slave-owners voluntarily freed their
own slaves were places where the ratio of labor supply to land acreage was
such that free laborers were available are relatively low wages. (Modern
slavery was more likely to persist when the "man/land" ratio was low, where
the only way the landowners could make a "decent" profit was to set up
absolute monopsonies in the labor market.)

>I'm not a big fan of world-systems theory, but when Immanuel Wallerstein
says that the shift from dependent to wage labor is almost always an
advance for workers, it sounds right to me.<

I would agree with Wallerstein, including the "almost."

Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx &
http://clawww.lmu.edu/Faculty/JDevine/jdevine.html
Bombing DESTROYS human rights. US/NATO out of Serbia!