But less profitable for everyone but the slaveowners. Slavery is economically a drag, not a benefit; they knew, but just didn’t care.
That’s because, like any other selfish person, all they cared about was their situtation. Of course it wasn’t sustainable. That’s a different issue, I believe, than viability.
This hinges on what “viable” means for who.
Switching from slavery to the modern less-emotionally loaded world, privatizing profits and socializing costly externalities has a long history. It’s a perfectly viable approach for the people doing the privatizing. It’s even viable for the society at large for awhile. An “awhile” that may be measured in centuries. But it almost certainly isn’t optimal for the society at large on any timeframe.
So who’s viability and timeframe are we scoring on?
In other news:
Freedom for wolves and freedom for sheep look very different from one another.
Part of that mindset is that you are a member of a God-given feudal aristocracy. Feudal lords require vassals that can’t just up and leave your service when it suits them. God has given you the “responsibility” of cruelly punishing your subjects that disobey you and by extension God.
Here’s a good article by Jeffrey Rogers Hummel that summarizes the long history of trying to answer the economic worth of slavery and gives what the sides believe today.
Two basic questions have remained intertwined throughout the history of economic thought regarding this ancient institution. First, was slavery profitable? And second, was slavery efficient? Was it profitable to individual slaveholders, in the sense of offering a reasonable prospect of monetary return (or some other material reward) comparable to what they could earn from other enterprises? Efficiency refers to overall economic gains. Did the exploitation of slave labor allocate and use resources in ways that fostered aggregate wealth and welfare, regardless of how unfairly it distributed wealth? Did it produce goods and services as abundant and valuable as alternative labor arrangements could have? Often economists and historians have reached identical answers to both questions, concluding that either slavery was both unprofitable and inefficient or both profitable and efficient.
It’s a long article and difficult to summarize, but in the end Hummel comes down in support of your contention, that slavery was profitable for plantation owners but a drag on overall Southern productivity. This contradiction is mostly explained by what economists call opportunity costs and deadweight losses.
Not using free labor, along with the laws making manumission almost impossible, meant that the skills and knowledge that slaves acquired over decades could not be used to start new businesses and spread advances across the South. By various means like gang labor, slave workers could eventually produce an hour’s worth of free workers’ output in half that time. But coercion in all its forms necessarily increased. The slave patrols to prevent the best workers running away were effectively a tax, therefore a loss, but one that was inflicted on small farmers who didn’t have slaves, reducing their potential.
In the largest picture, plantations provided returns as large as northern factories. Those also exploited workers and coerced them, but they could and did regularly leave, making room for new immigrants at the bottom, and using their skills to build the economy rather than concentrating it more narrowly.
Hummel mentions but doesn’t explain in lay terms the changes in historic and economic calculations over the last century. In the same way that carbon production and environmental issues are now considered when discussing industries, cultural and social issues associated with slavery, race, and class are now part of profit and loss evaluations of historic institutions. What one decides to include and how to create statistics from sources that never were intended to address them is critical and extremely contentious. Hummel notes that “among historians, those describing their own work as part of a “New History of Capitalism” now claim that slavery was the primary source of overall U.S. economic growth in the antebellum period.” As an economist he disagrees.
Whether he answers the OP’s question readers need to decide for themselves. My parsing suggests that cotton would have been viable because of the enormous demand but not as profitable. Obviously, never having slavery in the first place would have been by far the best
Also, free people make better consumers. The great fallacy of right wing economic thought (and its predecessors) is the insistence that that matters for the economy is the elite. Whether it’s slavery, kings sitting on huge treasuries or more modern ideas like trickle-down economics, they have the belief that it’s the wealthy who fuel the economy. When in reality, it’s the ordinary people who both produce wealthy and provide the biggest, most diverse market; a big pile of money just sitting there doesn’t do anything for the economy.
The same thing that made slavery profitable for the slaveowners - that the slaves got the bare minimum needed to survive, if that - made slavery bad for the economy.
in fact, he did it badly and got a Latina to do it for him (continuing his parasitism of women and men)
Right. He was a product of his time, and in many ways not a very nice person. But an interesting writer, though (like, say Hesse) his appeal was more to young men with dreams of adventure…?