An Introduction to the blog and a brief address of a claim found in "Empire of Wealth" by John Steele Gordon

An Introduction to the blog and a brief address of a claim found in "Empire of Wealth" by John Steele Gordon

     Hello, this is Henry Maynard Pigou or HMP for short, this blog is meant to serve as a repository for my studies surrounding economics both through my courses as an economics undergraduate and personal studies. The former will be generalist in approach while the latter is likely to center more heavily upon taxation and other topics within the domain of public economics. Also featured in the blog will be bad economics that I come across and inevitably that I come up with myself, I am by no means an expert in the field, nor do the experts get everything correct. With that addressed, the first topic will be low-hanging fruit from John Steele Gordon's "Empire of Wealth".

       Located on page 18, Gordon states the following without direct footnote or citation

    "Still, [indentured servants] were not quite slaves. (...) When they had finished their term of servitude, they would be free, (...). Given the short life expectancy of immigrants to Virginia, slaves, who cost more, were not an economic proposition compared with indentured servants." 

    Slavery can be identified as a capital investment, as wretched a thought as it might be, a slave is effectively a biological machine. In contrast, labor is not required to continue work beyond an agreed amount of time and must be paid for continued use. Indentured servitude certainly blurs the line, does indenture make them a piece of capital with a set life span, or a laborer with a very large block of time being sold at once? I will place the distinction in the right to all things the entity produces, most notably children. The offspring of female black slaves were treated as slaves themselves, making slaves a form of self replicating machinery (Hening, William Waller, pg 174, 1823). In contrast, in the case of an indentured woman becoming pregnant, the father took guardian ship of the child, provided her master was not the father (Hening, William Waller, pg 171-172, 1823). This distinction means, that while the upfront capital costs of a slave were likely higher, that did not make them economically unviable in comparison to indentured servants as claimed. Over time, the returns of not needing to buy new indentures, coupled with the selling of slaves would cover the difference in immediate costs. This system of slavery, with its high propensity to economies of scale, can be seen as what led the U.S. south to fall victim to being a single factory town through economic capture as capital was repeatedly invested in land and slavery, leading to the civil war.

Gordon, John: http://apushcanvas.pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/101399614/An%20Empire%20of%20Wealth.PDF

Hening, William Waller: https://archive.org/details/statutesatlargeb02virg/page/168/mode/2up