Slave-buying motivations

Macroeconomically it's terrible, driving down the price of labor while restricting the market size. Microeconomically it's very alluring with the promise of free labor. Slavery isn't something you can simply ban until the industrial revolution where a surplus of goods and productivity makes slavery unprofitable.

Also, some nation just produce slavery-like condiction that at times the diferent between then and slavery is almost pendanty, the whole sweatshop who made cheap cloth and stuff is good example for that.

To expand on this a bit, the Slave Power economy was great if you were part of the plantation aristocracy. There were more millionaires in the Deep South than there were in the rest of the United States. The slaves themselves as assets were worth more than the railroads and factories in the North combined at the outset of the Civil War. And those slave owning millionaires controlled the state governments and upper social circles, and so set the economic path for the South all the way up until the Confederacy was destroyed. There was zero incentive for the leaders of the slave states to modernize an economy that was making them cash hand over fist.

Well, other than the possibility of being outcompeted, and eventually conquered, by a neighboring region with a more efficient economy.

As in what actually happened, historically.

Amazingly, even that didn't stop them from dragging their feet to modernize.

The plantation owners - and I need to stress that this was the planters on their own, not the Confederate government - initial plan to win the war was to embargo their own cotton under the assumption that Europe needed it so badly they'd intervene on the Confederacy's behalf to end the war. Why change the formula when it was clearly going to work so well?

Obviously the sheer arrogance utterly backfired.

The Civil War is often summed up as Industrial North vs Agricultural South. A more nuanced summary would be Industrial & Agricultural North vs Cash Crop South. Diverse economy vs... I don't know what the proper term is for a not diverse economy is, but that's what the Confederacy was.

Even without the slave states, the Union could easily feed its armies and civilian population with surplus to sell abroad. The Confederacy had put all its eggs in the slave grown cotton basket for long that even well into the war when they realized they needed to grow food or face starvation it didn't help because they never invested in roads and railways to get that food to where it needed to go.

Edited by Parable on Jul 3rd 2019 at 5:29:16 AM

On the other hand, stuff like china infamous swatshop and the whole "children making pants for 4 dolars" cant be compare to slavery in a modern age as a whole?.

They are actually making pretty good money relative to local prices, which is no excuse for the horrific conditions, but sets it off from actual slavery.

Mmmmmmmmm Call me esceptic on it, since at time horrific condiction seen pretty much diet slavery, but know maybe im off.

Maybe there's a better way to phrase it, but those kinds of labor conditions seem inevitable during the transition from a decentralized, subsistence agriculture economy to a centralized, industrial one. The people who work/worked in sweatshops are actually doing better than a significant portion of the populace of those countries, which use cheap labor as a selling point to get foreign capital in order to develop true, sustainable economies.

The sweatshop labor model is not sustainable in the long term, any more than the slave labor model, because the expansion of a nation's industrial base eventually demands more and more skilled workers who demand greater wages.

As bad as the sweatshop model is, the workers can walk off the job without the owners demanding them back at gunpoint. This economic freedom means that sweatshops can die naturally as the local economy improves.

Is this something will always happen? I mean, sweatshop and other chear and near slave condiction kinda happen for a need to create cheap material and always infinite demand, in case of china be kinda become the world factory for it.

Also I apologize if I sound insensitie, just learing here.

China is already on its way past the sweatshop phase of industrialization, to the point where companies that want the cheapest possible labor have been moving to poorer countries that haven't achieved what China has. This trend has been ongoing for a while.

Basically, any nation that wants to move itself out of Third World status needs capital to develop its own economy. There are two primary ways to get that capital:

• Have a natural resource that is in high demand that you can sell.
• Use cheap labor to attract industries to outsource their manufacturing (or service, in some cases).

The latter is generally more reliable and doesn't depend on the luck of happening to be located on something valuable. Also, the "gold rush" form of development tends to be extremely unstable.

Edited by Fighteer on Jul 5th 2019 at 12:38:07 PM

Never say "always." Of course there are (theoretical) ways for a developing nation to avoid it, depending on exactly what you mean by "sweatshop." The way international commerce works, each country seeks maximum economic advantage by offering for exchange something that they can make more cheaply than people overseas are willing to pay for it. This in turn causes nations to exchange different things, as each seeks advantage by offering for exchange things they can make a profit on, and then using that profit, in part, to buy the things overseas that they themselves cannot produce as cheaply.

For a variety of reasons the cost of living is lower in developing nations than in more developed ones, and that means that most developing nations have access to one resource that is cheaper for them than for the developed nations, and which they can offer for exchange at a profit: labor. So it is almost inevitable that labor costs will be lower in developing nations than in developed ones, and that developing nations will seek to take advantage of that difference to make a profit.

So laborers in developing nations will nearly always make less than their counterparts in more developed ones, even for more or less comparable work. In addition, the standard of living will also nearly always be less because the resources that make a high standard of living (mostly various forms of technology) are simply not available domestically at any price. So laborers are almost always going to be paid less and enjoy a reduced standard of living compared to people doing similar work in developed nations.

However, none of this necessarily makes dangerous or unpleasant working conditions inevitable. "Sweatshops" as we understand them occur because institutional protections in developing countries are generally weaker than they are in more developed ones, and that is mostly a function of a lack of experience and knowledge on the part of the populace. Industrial work is relatively new in most developing nations, where employment is traditionally small scale and employers are held accountable by a network of familial and local community relationships. These ties fall apart as the scale of employment grows, and since cultural development is much slower than technological development, it takes awhile (several generations usually) before public awareness catches up.

This picture is still somewhat idealistic, however, because it doesn't account for the negative effect of political forces. Vested interests, including local large employers and trading partners overseas, will act to preserve access to a cheap source of profit, retarding the social evolution that would otherwise occur. This is one reason why power structures are often more authoritarian in developing nations than in more developed ones- monied interests in developed democratic nations promote authoritarian governance overseas because it preserves their economic advantages.

So "sweatshops" per se are not inevitable, but it would take a consistent and active attempt, supported by the developed governments of the world, to avoid and suppress them in developed nations. So far, the political willpower to do that has been lacking.

Edited by DeMarquis on Jul 6th 2019 at 6:01:35 AM