But persistence studies also breed something dangerous: determinism. If ancient history is so influential, what hope do we have to shape our destiny? Which is why I love a new paper by Lukas Althoff and Hugo Reichardt, examining the lasting economic impact of slavery. Their findings look like the normal persistence story: black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved before the civil war have had significantly worse economic outcomes ever since, compared with black Americans whose forefathers were free – even in 2023, descendants of enslaved people had incomes $11,620 lower than other black Americans.
But this is a story about continuing choices too. Why? Because the direct effect of your ancestors being enslaved fades by 1940. What drives the lasting disadvantage is that those whose ancestors were enslaved were more likely to live in states that went on suppressing black Americans even after the abolition of slavery – via infamous Jim Crow laws, which lasted in southern states until the 1960s.
Quite so. Therefore reparations for slavery aren’t justified.
Reparations for Jim Crow could be, maybe, justified. But that’s easy, we just make the Democratic Party pay them.
We don’t need any hifalutin intellectual reasoning as to why we shouldn’t pay reparations. We shouldn’t pay reparations because fuck off you cunts is more than enough by way of explanation.
Yup. Clogs to clogs gets rid of most poverty. Abigail Disney blowing through granddad’s money while Shaq is a billionaire from a broken home.
To take an idea from the Jack Lemmon (and Virna Lisi – down boy) movie ‘How to murder your wife’, I propose a button. A big red button.
All those grizzling about slavery have a choice – press the red button and the tranatlantic slave trade did not happen*. Not one bit of it, meaning every descendant of those who were traded will never have / do not exist. Gone, in a puff of smoke. America would be 88% white, 12% Hispanic / Native /Islanders etc.
I wonder how many would be willing to press the button……….
* Of course, the blacks and arabs** would still have taken / bought/ sold slaves throughout Africa and Europe (and let’s not forget the Barbary Pirates), but hey ho.
** Who castrated all the blokes, so not too many of their descendants about to claim for reparations.
p.s. I would press it…………..
You surely don’t need much get up and go to have got up and gone in the lapse of more than two generations (always accepting the contention that geography is the deciding factor).
Perhaps if you were genetically inclined to accept slavery, your descendants also have the same outlook?
I’ve said this before I know but surely the fairest form of reparations for these descents of slaves would be a one way ticket to Africa.
Southern Blacks might do better suing the Democrat party for those Jim Crow laws.
That’s something I could get behind.
This has to be confounded in so many ways, most certainly TMB’s get up and go.
Also that free blacks were very likely slave owners themselves, I would wager pre civil war free southern blacks were more likely than southern whites to be slave owners.
Given that he’s an MP, shouldn’t he be worrying more about the UK than the US?
Instead of trying to drift free cash, perhaps the coloureds could try some actual work for recompense.
Though that is hard work, easier to blame the Founding Fathers.
Bollocks, grift not drift. Pity the new hypervisor didn’t include an edit function.
Why did US states need Jim Crow laws?
You’ll note that white convicts transported to the US were only required to work for the period of their sentence.
Clearly it was the black Africans who supported slavery, and sold their criminals, neighbours, surplus population and anyone they could catch to the white traders.
So obviously it’s the Africans who should pay the reparations. And of course the compensation to the whites for dumping all these pests on them.
Also, what happened when they got rid of Jim Crow laws, is the United States a nice place to live now?
So I can’t grift off my ancestors’ enslavement 3000-2000 years ago?
20,000 Haitians were recent shipped to the small town (pop. 60k) of Springfield, Ohio, at the expense of the natives.
Now people’s pets are going missing.
Who is going to pay reparations to the people of the formerly American town of Springfield, Ohio?
By the way, not only are they all lawyers and doctors, but they’re just like us:
A woman in Ohio was arrested after police say she stomped a cat to death and ate it in front of multiple people.
A 27-year-old woman was charged Wednesday with cruelty to companion animals, according to Stark County court records.
Canton police arrested the woman on Aug. 16 after they say she killed and ate a cat in a “residential area in front of multiple people,” according to an arrest report obtained by USA TODAY.
On the day of the incident, Canton police officers responded to the scene after receiving a complaint about a woman who “had killed a cat and was eating it,” an investigative report said. When officers arrived, they saw a woman with her hands on a cat “which appeared to have its head smashed in,” the report continued.
Blood was observed on the woman’s feet, hands and fur was on her lips, the report said.
The blessings of Diversity include Mr Tibby being beaten to death and eaten raw.
Steve @ 12.40, as my town is currently being invaded by lots of dusky people, I can only hope that they do indeed start eating cats as that will stop them* shitting in my front garden. It’s no joke clearing up 10 piles of shit every other day.
I know I could put some Dettol or antifreeze down but i’m not that cruel……..
*The cats not the invaders…….although I believe some residents of Notting Hill have found some interesting ‘deposits’ in their gardens after ‘Carnival’ so it could be either.
Addollff – as an ailurophile, I would rather have Mr Tibby than Mr Stabby-Rapey.
That lady in Ohio needed one of these
https://youtu.be/6I0mrndMzaE?si=L59fOsLA0V_G9G8v
Adolff,
HTMYW – one of my all-time favourites. Couldn’t be made now, of course, because it would be labelled “misogynistic.” In fact it’s a love story about women winning over the menfolk.
m @ 2.16, the bit at the end when the mother smiled at Terry Thomas and he just wilted………..
And as regards your final sentence, it is as so many other things, the ones who complain never quite understand (like Benny Hill getting his hands on a young bit of stuff and it eventually killing him).
@ TMB
A lot of those with “Get up and Go” got up and went to Detroit (I hdn’t realised that it is now over 70% Black)
Motown was the creation of middle class educated black people in Detroit. This wasn’t just ‘street music’, it was produced by musicians who had had classical training and businessmen who knew and understood how the market worked.
But also Detroit is the archetype of White Flight, not only by the white inhabitants but by the black generation that worked in the now closed car plants, leaving the next one behind.
The ones “Left Behind” in Detroit were the ones who couldn’t afford to leave, mostly unemployed and retired black folks.
@ Interested. Precisely. Reparations is just a grift, so ‘fuck off’ is precisely the appropriate response. No justification necessary.
@ Adolff – I’d press it too. The silence will be a bliss indeed.
the black Africans who supported slavery, and sold their criminals, neighbours, surplus population and anyone they could catch to the white traders.
It was a bit more complex than that. They sold their criminals, neighbours, surplus population and anyone they could catch to black traders, who brought them to the coast. Where they were actioned. Any other words, it was a complete industry. It just happened to be whites who bought them. At this point they were slaves & would have remained slaves, whoever bought them.
Detroit is Muslim country now, there were 1.4 million Arabic speakers there in 2021 and 140 mosques (and growing) across Michigan.
(This is all, of course, completely normal and not a society curling up and dying in front of our eyes.)
RoboCop better have translation software.
I think poverty is bad.
We should help those in poverty.
By the way Trump has admitted he lost, and it has annoyed his former supporters.
https://youtu.be/f203cIx-_Uc?si=gJ_YOShjsDDqQZDv
Blessed are they that considereth the poor
That considereth the poor and needy
The Lord shall deliver them in times of trouble
He shall deliver and comfort them.
Twiglet, it is our Christian duty to help those less fortunate than ourselves, but not necessarily those who are criminals.
I think the great northward migration is one of the least known stories around the civil rights era. About 7 million blacks left the southern states between 1910 and 1970.
Poverty is bad. We should help those in poverty.
“But Jesus, can’t we just give our money to the Romans and let them do it for us”
Ok, let’s start again and tell me where I lost you.
Poverty is a reward for laziness. Or at least that’s what people born into poverty tell me.
Bloke In Spain. That is offensive and warped. Poverty is what happens for good people, who do not get given chances they deserve in life, for many disabled people. And would you call an African slave or child labourer in Africa, as lazy? You do not live in the real World.
Many people are discriminated against by bullies in the job market. People get discriminated against for reasons like being of an ethnic minority, being shy, being homosexual, being nice, being disabled, being a woman, being of a different religion, being disfigured, being the wrong class, being mentally ill.
And the rich are often nasty people.
Good point Twiglet.
@Twiglet
The real problem of poverty is not a problem of “distribution” but of production. The poor are poor not because something is being withheld from them but because, for whatever reason, they are not producing enough.
Henry Hazlitt
Thanks Norman.
I just knew there was some good selfish reason why I wanted to burn all the Greens alive as biofuel!!
Boganboy ; That is murder. Murder is evil.
Norman ; That is not true. Look at an African child working hard to have food, or a slave working the cotton fields, or a disabled man stuck in bed, or a man with a mentall illness or shyness who is discriminated from work, despire studying hard at school and university. Then some guy who gets paid to write books talks about PRODUCTIVITY and the poor being lazy. It is nonsense. Send Henry down the mines with a spade, and a candle, and then he can come back and talk about productivity and poverty. Pots and toss.
Bullying and discrimination can appear anywhere, but I’ll bet it was more rife in the Nationalised Industries. I only have anecdata from living near Easington Colliery which was the last deep mine to close in the UK, with the workforce drawn from an overwhelmingly white town which was regarded as backwards even by its near neighbour of Peterlee.
In an industry where there is competition and not-State ownership, the owners pay a price in profits and attendance rates if there is bullying or discrimination, so they have an incentive to stamp it out.
That is offensive and warped.
That’s the opinion of my regular breakfast companion who was born & grew up in a Brasilian favela. I think she might have slightly more insight than you.
The poor are poor not because something is being withheld from them but because, for whatever reason, they are not producing enough.
That was where a discussion with some Brasilian former favourers of Lula ended up recently. The problem with Brasil is it has so many poor that redistribution of wealth isn’t going to get them anywhere. You’d end up redistributing away from the people producing what Brasil does produce. In other words, disincentivising what you want more of. They’re now going through their second experiment with this.
You have to produce a situation where the labour potential of the poor has value & is sought after. And the only way that’s been found of reliably doing this is market capitalism. It’s by no means an instant fix. But it does work. The poor can even do it for themselves. After all, they originally did. Everywhere. Everybody was originally poor, weren’t they?
Yeah BiS.
That’s why I loathe the Greens. They want to make everyone, especially ME, live in poverty.
Would you know why Brasil hasn’t industrialised? Did the Catholic Church insist that the country avoid all that horrid contamination from the Protestant heretics?
Still, lots of other countries are industrialising these days. So no doubt they’ll get there. It’ll only be those places that are de-industrialising, like Oz, that’ll have problems.
Oh you’re right Boganboy. Catholic countries had laws preventing the things led to the industrial revolution. Great people for protecting vested interests, the Church. Being one.
Brasil sure has a lot of poor. It also has enormous numbers of people who, whilst not poor, are far from wealthy. The few wealthy it has, their wealth is mainly tied up in assets. Like agricultural land. So say you parcelled out that land & gave it to the poor? You’d lose all the economies of scale make it productive. You’d be back to subsistence farming with few surpluses. The rest of Brasil would be starving. Or who would you sell the assets to? Not the wealthy. You just confiscated their wealth. Foreigners who would harvest all the profits? Sounds like you want the return of the Portuguese.
BiS
Thanks for the info.
From what little I know of Brasil, I’d advocate ending all the laws about preservation of the Amazon jungles, plenty of whole-hearted exploitation of Brasil’s mineral wealth, education of as much of the populace as will do the work to produce skilled labour, and burning unlimited amounts of fossil fuel to industrialise the place as much as possible.
Roughly like we did in Oz before the Greens began to gain control.