New answers tagged labor-cost
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Could data possibly be generated to determine whether slavery is economically efficient in an industrial economy where the data would be independent of ideology? I doubt it.
If economic efficiency means maximum social utility, and if that means an effort to produce social outcomes which generate the greatest good for the greatest number of people in society, ...
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Why are profits higher from agricultural/automatable work, but not those from factory work and non-automatable services, when using slaves rather than wage labor?
Labor with freedom enables the development of human capital, which becomes more important to productivity when work involves specialized skills and a goal of quality (not merely quantity). The ...
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Slavery is not the root issue here. The level of automation and the required investment (and human capital to decide, do and handle it) is the core issue: today we can find firms that produce almost the same goods but one firm does it with lot of automation and robots and AI but other firm does it with lot of manual labor, with work that is almost inhuman ...
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Necessary Caveats When Discussing Slavery:
First before tackling this question it is important to note that this issue is broad and complex. This is because there is no single 'slavery'. For example, slavery under the Roman Empire was not the same as slavery practiced in US south (see Tamin; 2017). Furthermore, even within a given society there might be ...
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Slavery increased with the growth of state capacity. More government caused enslavement. The fall of the Roman empire reversed this trend and caused feudalism. As government regrow it took the form of corvee and other tax slavery.
As rents increased, it was no longer needed to enslave. Instead of enslaving everyone the government can just give pieces of ...
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Prices were too high. 2 billion pounds of cotton were picked annually by 2 million american slaves at ten cents per pound. That's 100 dollars per year output for a slave that cost thousands, plus upkeep. Slavery cost more than farm rent. Wages are cheaper than the equivalent ownership cost because they can be tailored to a specific task rather than buying ...
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