All purpose news and politics thread part VI: This Is Not The Time For Posing

[Xheight]

More people need to read 'the American Slave Coast'.



Folks really fail to grasp just how deeply wound into the economy slavery was, much of the time deliberately.

https://www.amazon.com/American-Slav.../dp/1613738935

lawdy...history is replete with awfulness all you and such books do is ask that you keep staring at one spot of it. HYPE.

Koreans as you may recall were occupied by Japan for 35 years and committed many of the same atrocious things that China would experience including attempts to eradicate Korean culture.

Meanwhile books have been written on how Japan advanced Korea into the modern nation. Sorry but history is not a zero sum tabulation of GDP vs. human rights.

[Xheight]

The same thing happened near the end of Nixon's Presidency. There was fear that Nixon was losing it and might start a nuclear war.

Structurally and legally though that is a break in the chain in command whatever the rationalization. Unelected state employees are there to execute the directives not make policy and control the country.

[Mister Mets]

Double counting doesn't get you from 8% to 80%, it's pretty obvious that the AIER article was just as concerned with fitting ideological priors as the original study, and likely far more so.

According to the website, they double-counted and triple counted different intermediate transactions. Triple-counting one thing and double-counting another can very quickly add up.

https://www.aier.org/article/the-sta...ations-agenda/

Coates’s numbers come from Cornell University historian Ed Baptist’s 2014 book The Half Has Never Been Told. In a key passage in the book, Baptist purports to add up the total value of economic activity that derived from cotton production, which at $77 million made up about 5 percent of the estimated gross domestic product (GDP) of the United States in 1836. Baptist then committed a fundamental accounting error. He proceeded to double and even triple count intermediate transactions involved in cotton production — things like land purchases for plantations, tools used for cotton production, transportation, insurance, and credit instruments used in each. Eventually that $77 million became $600 million in Baptist’s accounting, or almost half of the entire antebellum economy of the United States.

There’s a crucial problem with Baptist’s approach. The calculation of GDP, the main formulation of national accounts and a representation of the dollar amount of economic activity in a country in a given year, only incorporates the value of final goods and services produced. The rationale for doing so comes from accounting, as the price of the final good already incorporates intermediate transactions that go into its production and distribution. Baptist’s numbers are not only wrong — they reflect a basic unfamiliarity with the meaning and definition of GDP.

There was a further link to the blog of economist Bradley Hansen, who says that a further problem is the lack of any basis for some of the numbers.

https://bradleyahansen.blogspot.com/...-envelope.html

There is, however, an even deeper problem with this back of the envelope accounting:

perhaps $40 million

probably added up to about $100 million

might have added up to $200 million


Baptist is simply pulling numbers out of thin air, or a hat, or wherever it is that he gets them. Back of the envelope calculations tend to involve simplifying assumptions. Baptist seems to understand the term to mean that he can just make things up. The only reference provided is to Table 4.1. Table 4.1 does not provide, as one might assume, information about shipping and insurance. It does not even have any information at all for the year 1836.

As a minor point, Baptiste didn't get to eighty percent.

That seemed to be based on a misunderstanding of another economist noting that the total value of slaves was roughly equivalent to eighty percent of GDP, and others misunderstanding that as the annual economic output of slaves equaling eighty percent of GDP.

We could determine whether the AIER piece was compromised due to the author's ideological priors if there's any rebuttal to the main arguments.

[Malvolio]

lawdy...history is replete with awfulness all you and such books do is ask that you keep staring at one spot of it. HYPE.

Koreans as you may recall were occupied by Japan for 35 years and committed many of the same atrocious things that China would experience including attempts to eradicate Korean culture.

Meanwhile books have been written on how Japan advanced Korea into the modern nation. Sorry but history is not a zero sum tabulation of GDP vs. human rights.

"...staring at one spot of it." Slavery existed in America for almost 250 years, and had an effect on every aspect of American society. That's hardly staring at one spot.

[Kirby101]

Did someone say something about denial. Did Americans sign up to the Stalin party and carry cards that said so or French Students embrace Mao only? nope they were all part of Socialism.

Do you have a problem with reading comprehension? Or is my last line to obscure for you?

And yeah, the left hasn't changed since the 1930s and 40s with all those "card carrying Communists"

[Mister Mets]

Doesn't DeathSantis want that job? Florida Man vs Florida Man sounds like a better movie and more representative of the current death cult than one with Spineless Mikey.

Often presidential elections have multiple people who want the job.

It will be interesting to see what happens in the primary, and how the next two years affect the reputations of the candidates.

It's actually the Military stopping an incredibly deranged and dangerous imbecile from starting WWIII.

Except it doesn't seem he was making any effort to start WWIII. That is a separate argument from whether it was prudent for officers to take the steps.

[Kirby101]

Except it doesn't seem he was making any effort to start WWIII. That is a separate argument from whether it was prudent for officers to take the steps.

The book says they worried he would launch an unwarranted nuclear strike. So yeah, we are talking about WWIII.

[Kirby101]

If anything, the Biden administration has been beating the war drums against China far louder than Trump did. With Trump you get the sense that he had a certain admiration for Xi and valued their personal relationship, and was just pandering to his base with the hawkish rhetoric. But Biden and his people seem to genuinely believe that they are making the world safe for democracy by continuing to prod the Chinese on a whole host of issues. On the flipside, while the Chinese officials seemed to have a degree of respect or fear of Trump's unpredictability, they clearly have nothing but utter contempt for Biden and have gone out of their way to snub him at every turn. So in that kind of an environment, it's really only a matter of time until someone lets their pride get the better of them and does something rash.

That's a crock. They are talking about Trump launching a nuclear strike. So they were right to fear his instability. And Biden is being confrontational, yes, beating the "war drums" Bullshit.
You often voice your opinion of people's motivation as if it is fact. It's not, as The Dude said, "That's like just your opinion Man."

[Xheight]

Well I think the argument that he was trying to make was that, if slavery was really just an insignificant part of the American economy during the antebellum period, then it can largely just be brushed aside as a minor blemish on an otherwise noble time period, and that America could have easily reached its current level of power and wealth even without relying on it. Of course, this argument is absolutely bunk if you think about it for just a few seconds. For one thing, capturing, transporting, and guarding slaves was an extremely costly and time-consuming endeavor, if plantation owners could have achieved similar levels of productivity simply by hiring wage laborers they would have just done that. Only if the potential profits from using slave labor were so great that they far outweighed the costs of importing them would it make sense to operate a slave economy. And if slavery was really not all that important to the economy, why did the South go to war to preserve the institution? Surely losing 8% of your GDP would not be a big deal compared to the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives and total devastation of many major towns and cities.

The thing is, even if the GDP calculation is off, you can only really understand the full impact of slavery by looking at the bigger picture. Slavery was the only thing that made American agriculture competitive on the global markets, because if the plantations had relied on wage labor to pick cotton they would have never been able to compete on price with production in places like Egypt and India, and indeed after the war ended much of the global production shifted to those areas. Without slavery, much of the South would likely have become a land of small subsistence farmers, following that old Jeffersonian vision, and without the massive pile of excess profits to invest in new technologies to improve efficiency, the country as a whole would have industrialized much more slowly and would likely have been left behind by the European empires, never attaining the status of world power that we take for granted now.

Do think on it along side a host of facts which perforate your balloon of hot air. Egypt's cotton was created to compete and offset US cotton for one in a monopolistic move that England was all about creating to further indebt American production.

Eric Williams, in his Capitalism and Slavery (1), points to the role of the slave trade in developing the insurance industry. Sven Beckert shows the number of other modern financial tools that the global cotton industry caused to be developed. Slavery was a capital-intensive business and the expansion of US cotton agriculture depended on large sources of credit, most commonly the London money market, where loans were frequently secured on mortgages on slaves. More ingeniously, these mortgages were then turned into bonds that could be sold to European and US investors in a manner that both spread the risk and commodified the enslaved person, making slave owning more acceptable to early Victorian gentlefolk. Therefore, it is hardly surprising to see Baring Brothers Bank at the centre of this financial web, being one of the prime issuers of such bonds. Another modern financial tool produced by slave-based agriculture was the idea of the ‘futures market’ as financiers who traded in cotton, and the Barings were amongst the biggest of these, traded in shipments ‘to arrive’ while they were still on the high seas.

you can see that "reason" for the existence of economies is not as simply as you state. not unlike our Housing bubble the values being traded on markets had little to nothing to do with homes and the ability to pay.

[Xheight]

That's a crock. They are talking about Trump launching a nuclear strike. So they were right to fear his instability. And Biden is being confrontational, yes, beating the "war drums" Bullshit.
You often voice your opinion of people's motivation as if it is fact. It's not, as The Dude said, "That's like just your opinion Man."

LOL instability ? according to who? OP-Ed writers with axes to grind?

[Mister Mets]

The book says they worried he would launch an unwarranted nuclear strike. So yeah, we are talking about WWIII.

They were worried he would do it. This doesn't mean that he was likely to do it. That said, even if he was unlikely to do it, it could very well be that these were worthwhile steps because of the potential for catastrophic harm.

Which you fail to do...

The United States provided 45 percent of the world's gold production between 1851 and 1855. The nation was thus able to export gold, which helped offset the country's negative balance of payments in the 1850s. A negative balance caused by cotton

still failing to address this.

We've seen links here about the economic output connected to slavery.

Do you have sources about the economic output of the gold rush at its peak?

[Xheight]

"...staring at one spot of it." Slavery existed in America for almost 250 years, and had an effect on every aspect of American society. That's hardly staring at one spot.

and everywhere else for hundreds more everywhere else...so. You convoluted notions of effect are like much of bloated and ideologically driven scholarship - Pseudo social science.

[PwrdOn]

That's a crock. They are talking about Trump launching a nuclear strike. So they were right to fear his instability. And Biden is being confrontational, yes, beating the "war drums" Bullshit.
You often voice your opinion of people's motivation as if it is fact. It's not, as The Dude said, "That's like just your opinion Man."

Biden's moves present far more of a credible threat to China than Trump's ramblings, but I'm sure that in the face of all of this pressure the Chinese will just fold and accede to all of our demands. This all stick and no carrot type of diplomacy never works because it doesn't give the other party a way to make any concessions without looking like they're capitulating. What could possibly be the outcome of this if not war?

lawdy...history is replete with awfulness all you and such books do is ask that you keep staring at one spot of it. HYPE.

Koreans as you may recall were occupied by Japan for 35 years and committed many of the same atrocious things that China would experience including attempts to eradicate Korean culture.

Meanwhile books have been written on how Japan advanced Korea into the modern nation. Sorry but history is not a zero sum tabulation of GDP vs. human rights.

Books which were invariably written by Japanese authors looking to whitewash their ugly history in Korea, and not doing it particularly convincingly. Meanwhile the vast majority of Korean people view the period of Japanese rule as just about the worst thing ever and continue to hold a grudge to this day, which sort of throws a wrench in American plans for Japan and Korea to form a united front against China.

[Kirby101]

They were worried he would do it. This doesn't mean that he was likely to do it. That said, even if he was unlikely to do it, it could very well be that these were worthwhile steps because of the potential for catastrophic harm.

To bring things around, my response was to Jack Daws post about the Woodward book. So all the subsequent discussion is based on the book.
You can have a separate discussion on if the book is accurate.

[Kirby101]

Biden's moves present far more of a credible threat to China than Trump's ramblings, but I'm sure that in the face of all of this pressure the Chinese will just fold and accede to all of our demands. This all stick and no carrot type of diplomacy never works because it doesn't give the other party a way to make any concessions without looking like they're capitulating. What could possibly be the outcome of this if not war?

I don't find your analysis credible.
I am willing to put down a money bet that Biden will not start a war with China.
Name your wager.