New paper quantifies how quickly Southern planters recovered from the civil war
economist.com
economist.com
It has been extraordinarily easy to rob black families of their wealth, whether through exclusionary institutional policy that keeps them from building or maintaining wealth through conventional means, exclusionary networking that keeps them from learning about new and unconventional means, or simply through the act of burning it down.
Many wealthy black men and women are self-made in the real sense; that is, they don't have networks like the ones described in the article to pass down to their children, who, as a result, are essentially starting from square-one (plus their more elite educations, which only do so much good[1]).
1 - https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/05/29/...
There have been talks in the past of expanding the Post Offie's charter to encompass basic banking services like savings accounts and cashing check.
One interesting 'product' I'd never heard of was a savings club where every member contributes $x every month, and every n months you get $x*n. It performs a similar consumption smoothing as a credit product
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/06/18/193176928/epis...
But to speculate on your question, i strongly doubt that finding yourself owning prime land years after purchasing it translates to multi generation wealth. Yes the lives of those families would be better if they sold and did something useful with the money. I suspect mostly it would be wasted away, mismanaged and wilted down thru inheritance, that’s my observation from personal observation of how much land wealth my x*grandfather had compared to my parents
https://www.theringer.com/2018/6/28/17511818/black-wall-stre...
Trust me, it's 100% possible to be living a life in 2019, even as an American, defined by tyranny and injustice. Now, not the same level of tyranny as Black slaves, but you'll become aware people are just the same. Most dont genuinely give a shit. The ones that do cant be bothered to do anything about it. Too many will takr advantage of you. And the closest most people can get to morality is defined by social norms.
Edit: people downvote this, sadly showing this to be right. What would show this to be wrong is if someone offered help. I'm pretty sure people just want to virtue signal.
Using downvotes to validate your position is a logical fallacy. I see it often enough here that there ought to be a catchy name for it. Martyrdom Fallacy, maybe?
I kind of agree with your reply to citrablue, though - "downvote to disagree without explanation" is a really poor communication channel. "I was downvoted without comment, and now I see the error of my ways" said no one ever.
But not one person has done that.
Anyways, about the downvotes thing. While focusing too much on the downvotes thing is kind of a distraction to the main idea, I can tell you I have a reasonable load of karma here and it is easy to get by writing comments stating the obvious, or agreeing with consensus. Controversial comments or novel ideas can be of high value, but garner low or negative karma. So I dont think you're really accurate about that. Further, generalizing about internet karma points as being especially meaningful in general contexts, like you did, is already a questionable idea.
The Vice President of the Confederacy literally stood and gave a speech about why slavery was the reason they seceded from the union, but I’m not really surprised to find people who still try to distort the truth to push their views. It’s their way to virtue signal.
In fact, the main point of my post was closer to something like "people generally aren't good, but just want to virtue signal to sound good." Obviously, the fact that the south was even worse (and still even tried to justify it on moral grounds) seems to fit into that idea.
Anyways, the responses here are not giving me much faith in humanity. I'm still living with tyranny. Anyone want to step up, or just keep alternating between virtue signalling and being outraged?
Stop and frisk would not have mostly ended in New York City if people were not outraged by it. Of course ending it hasn't solved most of our problems, but it's better to have 99 problems than to have 100. Should we just sit on our hands until someone in a million years devises the utopia that is compatible with human behavior?
Should every injustice need to wait for its opportunity to be used as a pretext for power struggles in order for it to be thwarted?
What about the people living with tyranny today? Does it matter that they can ask for help and nobody cares about them. And people will even bully and criticize them? Even today? Even right here?
In the momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.
The hostility to this institution commenced before the adoption of the Constitution, and was manifested in the well-known Ordinance of 1787, in regard to the Northwestern Territory.
The feeling increased, until, in 1819-20, it deprived the South of more than half the vast territory acquired from France.
The same hostility dismembered Texas and seized upon all the territory acquired from Mexico.
It has grown until it denies the right of property in slaves, and refuses protection to that right on the high seas, in the Territories, and wherever the government of the United States had jurisdiction.
It refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to extinguish it by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion.
It tramples the original equality of the South under foot.
It has nullified the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain.
It advocates negro equality, socially and politically, and promotes insurrection and incendiarism in our midst.
It has enlisted its press, its pulpit and its schools against us, until the whole popular mind of the North is excited and inflamed with prejudice.
It has made combinations and formed associations to carry out its schemes of emancipation in the States and wherever else slavery exists.
It seeks not to elevate or to support the slave, but to destroy his present condition without providing a better.
It has invaded a State, and invested with the honors of martyrdom the wretch whose purpose was to apply flames to our dwellings, and the weapons of destruction to our lives.
It has broken every compact into which it has entered for our security.
It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our social system.
It knows no relenting or hesitation in its purposes; it stops not in its march of aggression, and leaves us no room to hope for cessation or for pause.
It has recently obtained control of the Government, by the prosecution of its unhallowed schemes, and destroyed the last expectation of living together in friendship and brotherhood.
Utter subjugation awaits us in the Union, if we should consent longer to remain in it. It is not a matter of choice, but of necessity. We must either submit to degradation, and to the loss of property worth four billions of money, or we must secede from the Union framed by our fathers, to secure this as well as every other species of property. For far less cause than this, our fathers separated from the Crown of England.
Our decision is made. We follow their footsteps. We embrace the alternative of separation; and for the reasons here stated, we resolve to maintain our rights with the full consciousness of the justice of our course, and the undoubting belief of our ability to maintain it.
He was a racist white supremacist conspiracy theorist. His opinions on slavery are completely unrelated to the events that transpired 30 years after his tenure.
That being said I think reparations at this point would ineffective and a politically infeasible. The money that would hypothetically be used for such a thing could be more effectively used providing services to low income areas.
Reparations today would be an entirely different topic and would probably look more like social programs that seek to repair the lasting effects of the less than ideal way those people entered the (paid) workforce 150 years ago.
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/articles/civil-war-casual...
Ultimately, if something similar happened today (immediate removal of 50% of rich people's so-called property or some other major wealth shock), avoiding a similar recovery couldn't be done without banning private schools and removing all children from their parents for long periods of time, along with forcibly relocating the previous property owners and not letting them network with each other.
[1] https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/redistribution-won-t-end-wealth-...
And doing so would be a net loss of value. Making people less educated doesn't help anyone.
There are a tremendous amount of public schools which give incredible educations. Much of the value of private schools is in social capital. While we can certainly point to the education levels of the worst of public schools and compare them with the best of private schools, the resume boost from a private school and the networks which are formed amongst parents and students have a much bigger impact on where a student lands than the actual differences in educations received.
Middle class, on the other hand, would happily follow cheaper rents and shorter commutes as long as the neighborhood is safe and reasonably clean. The latter two are often the problem though.
European history is full of destitute monarchs and nobility. The key to understanding the elite is that they are usually not wealthy - they are deeply in debt most of the time and that is what makes them seem so successful.
To understand this simply: suppose you have lots of money. naturally people will try to take it from you and may even kill you to steal it. On the other hand suppose you have lots of debts. Your creditors must keep you alive in order to recover their money and will steer business your way because they have a stake in whatever you earn.
So, counterintutitve as it may seem, having (the right) debts will make it easier to succeed then having lots of money.
Racism is a similar double-fault prejudice: "jobs are limited in number [wrong] so let's reserve them to 'our' kind of people [wrong and immoral]".
You need memory to implement tit for tat, which is the classical case of something like moral behavior evolving spontaneously.
Which is itself behind a paywall [1].
[1]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3363436