Economists Richard Hornbeck (University of Chicago) and Trevon Logan (Ohio State University) “One Giant Leap: Emancipation and Aggregate Economic Gains.”
We calculate that emancipation generated economic gains that exceed estimated costs of the Civil War …. Economic gains from emancipation are comparable to those from the largest increases in aggregate productivity in American history….
The costs of enslavement are inherently difficult to quantify, which leads to a wide range of quantitative estimates, but we calculate that emancipation generated aggregate economic gains worth the equivalent of a 4 percent to 35 percent increase in US aggregate productivity (7 to 60 years of technological innovation).
Logan at Bloomberg: “Slavery Was Never an Economic Engine”
Emancipation unlocked immense value for formerly enslaved Black people. Simply coming and going as they pleased during leisure time was a remarkable source of freedom and agency. Mundane tasks took on new meaning when done outside of chattel bondage. Neglecting to account for the value of freedom ignores those most affected by the institution.
In work with Richard Hornbeck, I have sought to quantify the value of freedom to those who were freed — the wealth created by reallocating 13% of the population from slave labor to using their time as they saw fit. We found that the benefit to the formerly enslaved far exceeded the associated declines in output of cotton and other relevant goods. So instead of destroying wealth, emancipation actually delivered the largest positive productivity shock in U.S. history. Under conservative assumptions about the value of non-working time to enslaved people, we estimate that the productivity gain was roughly 10% to 20% of gross domestic product.
HT : James Pethokoukis