
New paper quantifies how quickly Southern planters recovered from the civil war - JumpCrisscross
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2019/04/06/the-sons-of-slaveholders-quickly-recovered-their-fathers-wealth
======
bsanr
_A study of all Americans born between 1978 and 1983, by economists Raj
Chetty, Nathaniel Hendren, Maggie Jones and Sonya Porter, found that even the
black sons of wealthy parents exhibited extraordinary downward mobility
relative to whites. They also had much higher rates of incarceration. Unlike
white slaveholders after the civil war, intergenerational transmission of
black wealth one century later seems much more fragile._

It has been extraordinarily easy to rob black families of their wealth,
whether through exclusionary institutional policy that keeps them from
building or maintaining wealth through conventional means, exclusionary
networking that keeps them from learning about new and unconventional means,
or simply through the act of burning it down.

Many wealthy black men and women are self-made in the real sense; that is,
they don't have networks like the ones described in the article to pass down
to their children, who, as a result, are essentially starting from square-one
(plus their more elite educations, which only do so much good[1]).

1 -
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/05/29/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/05/29/no-
college-isnt-the-answer-reparations-are/)

~~~
theturtletalks
Reminds me of how Central Park is on land that was taken from a predominantly
black neighborhood called Seneca Village. The government used eminent domain
to strip the residents of their land. Where would those black families be if
they were allowed to keep that land in the heart of NY?

~~~
zaphirplane
You mean if the land taken from the native Americans that was sold African
Americans, wasn’t acquired by NY? At least the forced acquisition has a veneer
of legal and public good.

But to speculate on your question, i strongly doubt that finding yourself
owning prime land years after purchasing it translates to multi generation
wealth. Yes the lives of those families would be better if they sold and did
something useful with the money. I suspect mostly it would be wasted away,
mismanaged and wilted down thru inheritance, that’s my observation from
personal observation of how much land wealth my x*grandfather had compared to
my parents

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tick_tock_tick
In most cases they still owned large plantations which was always the real
source of wealth. Slaves were the means to extract that value from the land.
The end of the war lined up with serval advancements in farming technology (or
at-least the widespread use of them). Combined that with many of the former
slaves having no transferable skills and very limited bargaining power forced
them to work on the plantations for horrible wages.

~~~
empath75
Strong argument for reparations you just made. They should have given shares
in the plantations to the former slaves.

~~~
hannasanarion
Fun fact: in colonial days, grants of land, money, and food were mandated
whenever a white slave is emancipated. Turning out all of the black slaves
with nothing but the clothes on their backs was a new and intentional cruelty.

~~~
wallace_f
Jackson literally said slavery was going "to be not the real reason, but a
pretext" for aggression against the south. Lincoln also said he wasn't trying
to free the slaves.

Trust me, it's 100% possible to be living a life in 2019, even as an American,
defined by tyranny and injustice. Now, not the same level of tyranny as Black
slaves, but you'll become aware people are just the same. Most dont genuinely
give a shit. The ones that do cant be bothered to do anything about it. Too
many will takr advantage of you. And the closest most people can get to
morality is defined by social norms.

Edit: people downvote this, sadly showing this to be right. What would show
this to be wrong is if someone offered help. I'm pretty sure people just want
to virtue signal.

~~~
travmatt
“”” The new Constitution has put at rest forever all the agitating questions
relating to our peculiar institutions—African slavery as it exists among
us—the proper status of the negro in our form of civilization. This was the
immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution. Jefferson, in his
forecast, had anticipated this, as the "rock upon which the old Union would
split." He was right. What was conjecture with him, is now a realized fact.
But whether he fully comprehended the great truth upon which that rock stood
and stands, may be doubted. The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most
of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution
were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of
nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It
was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of
the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence,
the institution would be evanescent and pass away. [...] Those ideas, however,
were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of
races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a
Government built upon it—when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell." “””

The Vice President of the Confederacy literally stood and gave a speech about
why slavery was the reason they seceded from the union, but I’m not really
surprised to find people who still try to distort the truth to push their
views. It’s their way to virtue signal.

~~~
wallace_f
I'm not sure why you posted this. Are you sure you read my post? I never said
the South wasn't fighting to keep slavery.

In fact, the main point of my post was closer to something like "people
generally aren't good, but just want to virtue signal to sound good."
Obviously, the fact that the south was even worse (and still even tried to
justify it on moral grounds) seems to fit into that idea.

Anyways, the responses here are not giving me much faith in humanity. I'm
still living with tyranny. Anyone want to step up, or just keep alternating
between virtue signalling and being outraged?

~~~
bobthepanda
Who cares if it's virtue signalling and outrage if it still leads to a good
outcome? At some point awareness reaches a boiling point and change happens,
maybe not as fast as it should but it happens.

Stop and frisk would not have mostly ended in New York City if people were not
outraged by it. Of course ending it hasn't solved most of our problems, but
it's better to have 99 problems than to have 100. Should we just sit on our
hands until someone in a million years devises the utopia that is compatible
with human behavior?

~~~
wallace_f
Because it's an honest look at the world.

Should every injustice need to wait for its opportunity to be used as a
pretext for power struggles in order for it to be thwarted?

What about the people living with tyranny today? Does it matter that they can
ask for help and nobody cares about them. And people will even bully and
criticize them? Even today? Even right here?

------
identity-haver
Their conclusion is that the recovery is "the result of elite networks acting
as an invisible safety-net". As a thought experiment, how could this have been
avoided? One columnist [1] suggests that the core action is "the children of
the rich [forming] strong social bonds with the children of the poor". But
this is hard to do if the rich have their own schools and neighborhoods and
what not - so using the Fair Housing Act to further integrate neighborhoods is
suggested. But who knows their neighbors these days? If you can pay for
private schools, you basically never even have to talk to poor people. The
costs of this would land squarely on the middle and upper-middle class, while
the wealthiest could still buy their separation.

Ultimately, if something similar happened today (immediate removal of 50% of
rich people's so-called property or some other major wealth shock), avoiding a
similar recovery couldn't be done without banning private schools and removing
all children from their parents for long periods of time, along with forcibly
relocating the previous property owners and not letting them network with each
other.

[1] [https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/redistribution-won-t-end-
wealth-...](https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/redistribution-won-t-end-wealth-
inequality-1.1241076)

~~~
pitaj
> Ultimately, if something similar happened today (immediate removal of 50% of
> rich people's so-called property or some other major wealth shock), avoiding
> a similar recovery couldn't be done without banning private schools and
> removing all children from their parents for long periods of time, along
> with forcibly relocating the previous property owners and not letting them
> network with each other.

And doing so would be a net loss of value. Making people less educated doesn't
help anyone.

~~~
toofy
> And doing so would be a net loss of value. Making people less educated
> doesn't help anyone.

There are a tremendous amount of public schools which give incredible
educations. Much of the value of private schools is in social capital. While
we can certainly point to the education levels of the worst of public schools
and compare them with the best of private schools, the resume boost from a
private school and the networks which are formed amongst parents and students
have a much bigger impact on where a student lands than the actual differences
in educations received.

~~~
pitaj
Prove it. Show the evidence that private primary schools perform no better
than public schools.

------
peisistratos
Not quickly, but immediately - the Compromise of 1877 abandoned reconstruction
and handed back power to these people - the Redeemers.

------
erkose
This reminds me part 1 of the 2 part "Reconstruction: America After The Civil
War," airs tonight (April 9 and 16).

[https://www.pbs.org/weta/reconstruction/](https://www.pbs.org/weta/reconstruction/)

------
Animats
Then the landowners switched to sharecropping. All the profits with no
obligation to take care of the peasants. Like Uber.

~~~
travmatt
After the civil war the southern states instituted black codes to continue the
institutions of slavery.

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fopen64
That was the major ugliness of slavery, the double fault - keeping humans in
captivity because it was believed the economy would collapse and even the
slaves themselves would starve if freed.

Racism is a similar double-fault prejudice: "jobs are limited in number
[wrong] so let's reserve them to 'our' kind of people [wrong and immoral]".

~~~
deogeo
The problem with racism is that it works - populations that act preferentially
towards their own have an advantage over those that do not:
[http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/16/3/7.html.bak](http://jasss.soc.surrey.ac.uk/16/3/7.html.bak)

~~~
hannasanarion
Only as long as "us" is defined racially, which is itself racist.

~~~
deogeo
You are free to define 'us' any way you wish - it will not eliminate the
advantage of races that define it to their benefit. Unless you believe other
races have left racism behind them.

~~~
hannasanarion
Races don't exist.

------
pwinnski
[https://outline.com/mVmCFX](https://outline.com/mVmCFX)

~~~
aylmao
Hugh, the article is much shorter than I expected— even past the paywall it
seems to be mostly just a pointer at “The intergenerational effects of a large
wealth shock: white Southerners after the civil war,” by P. Ager, L. Boustan
and K. Eriksson.

Which is itself behind a paywall [1].

[1]:
[https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3363436](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3363436)

~~~
vonseel
Agreed, the article was so short it feels incomplete.

~~~
jonathankoren
Are we sure this isn't a scrape error, because it's stopping literally at the
end of the public view.

------
sytelus
So recovery time was just about 20 years. It makes sense though. You replace
$0 labour with $min_wage labour isn't going to put a big hole in wealthy
person's pocket considering the fact that now they don't pay for food, cloths,
shelter etc so the difference would be pretty minimal (the net gain for ex-
slave population is left over from $min_wage, i.e., their savings which be
zero to negligible). On the other hand, capitalism generally doubles wealthy
person's assets every 10-20 years so any loss would be easily erased within
couple of decades.

