Emancipation and Aggregate Economic Gains

 

 I recently listened to Rick Hornbeck on the Chicago Booth Review Podcast in the episode

An Economist Debunks Gone With the Wind

Its kind of  a silly name for the episode, but Hornbeck does a great job of describing important research by himself and and Trevon Logan. The paper calls for a significant reconceptualization of the economics of slavery. Hornbeck and Logan present slavery as a giant externality in which the labor of enslaved people was dramatically misallocated because slave holders did not have to take into consideration the full cost of their decisions. Consequently, although studies of emancipation have traditionally focused on the negative effect on production in the South, Hornbeck and Logan portray it as the biggest increase in productivity in American economic history.

You can access the working paper One Giant Leap: Emancipation and Aggregate Economic Gains  through the Becker Friedman Institute for Economics