Hacker News Reader

Comment by seph-reed | Hacker News Reader

This seems like an absolutely indispensable technology for achieving reparations. Most black Americans have ancestors who (slavery) worked a lot of unpaid hours. Having clear metrics on how many slaves there were is a step towards having a well founded number for what the cost of reparations should be.

There are some places in the US which have started, but they're just kind of pulling numbers out of a hat and I don't see that being scalable. But reparations should be paid, if for nothing else, at least for the unpaid hours.

Next we need to figure out who profited the most from slaves and where that money is today.

View on HN

Disclaimer: my parents are immigrants, and I have absolutely no genealogical connection to American slavery.

> having a well founded number for what the cost of reparations should be

I just don't understand how someone can talk about a "well-founded number" for reparations in a serious way.

How can you calculate a dollar amount, even within 5 orders of magnitude, for something that happened to millions of people for hundreds of years, affects millions of people today, and we don't have details about any of it?

There are many people who:

- had African ancestors who sold other Africans to slavers

- have a mixture of heritage

- immigrated from Africa long after slavery ended

It's nonsensical to come up with a dollar amount for even a single person, so how can we possibly do it at scale? Should African Americans descended from slave traders be paying reparations to African Americans descended from slaves? Should African Americans pay reparations to Native Americans for living on land that was stolen from them?

There are so few records for any of this, it just seems absolutely insane to me. I am a huge history nerd, and there aren't concrete answers for a lot of things that happened this decade, even with impeccable records.

> It's nonsensical to come up with a dollar amount for even a single person, so how can we possibly do it at scale?

It's almost as hard to come up with a fair number on how much help a given person should get due to being adversely affected by the pandemic. Yet that's not seen as a barrier to provide money.

> Should African Americans pay reparations to Native Americans for living on land that was stolen from them?

As a collective? Yes.

> It's almost as hard to come up with a fair number on how much help a given person should get due to being adversely affected by the pandemic. Yet that's not seen as a barrier to provide money.

Absolutely not. That is ludicrous.

There are measurable effects to the pandemic: changes in income, medical expenses, etc. There is certainly an emotional toll for even the best-off people, but no one is proposing paying people for emotional pain. It's all about getting them through this exceptional (and temporary) time.

Reparations for slavery are about things that can't be measured (generations of lost opportunities, not months), immense/immeasurable pain, and a long tail of policies (like racist zoning laws) that outlived slavery by 100+ years.

Your analogy to the pandemic actually makes it even more stark how difficult it is to calculate something so large, complex, and obscured by the fog of history.

> As a collective? Yes.

OK, let's say you do this. Let's say you decide the amount that a particular official/organized tribe should get is $1T. You don't have to decide who gets the money because the tribe has already done all that legwork for you and has an official roll.

Now how do you decide who pays? Do you try to trace the heritage of every American and determine when/how they took tribal land?

Maybe not. So do you just take it out of social programs? The same social programs that are intended to fix some of the cycles of poverty that people descended from slaves are relying on to get them some equity?

Well, you can't do that either. So how do you decide who pays, and who decides who pays?

Eventually you get into the business of punishing or rewarding people for their ancestors' crimes, which is not at all different from forcing a murderer's child to give money to his victim's family. If you look at it in a microcosm, it seems completely insane because it is.

Your ancestry definitely has a big effect on your life, but that's not the same as being culpable for their crimes, and it's not deterministic. My family was fantastically wealthy until my dad's generation, and then they were poor. Should my dad, as a completely broke 25-year-old, have had to pay reparations to someone for his ancestors' wealth (which I'm sure was gained unfairly)?

> Reparations for slavery are about things that can't be measured

If it can't be measured, it should be omitted. Nobody is suggesting making up random numbers based off feelings.

> Should my dad, as a completely broke 25-year-old, have had to pay reparations to someone for his ancestors' wealth (which I'm sure was gained unfairly)?

First off, if your dad is actually 25, you are fantastically intelligent for your age (and props for that). But also, there are ways to use math to make things fair. For instance: progressive taxation based off wealth. Lower income pay a small percentage (probably less than 1%) while higher income pays 1-2%. And given that slavery lasted ~90 years, so too could the timeline for paying reparations.

There are solutions here. Nobody is saying do it all at once and make people starve. But there is a way to pay off -- if nothing else -- the debt of unpaid hours.

It's better late than never, and if there is one thing the world respects about Germany, it's that they owned up. We can too.

Honestly, I'd be willing to say this could be one of the best cost vs benefit long-term PR investments the US could make on the world stage. But only if it's done right, and not as a punitive thing.

> If it can't be measured, it should be omitted. Nobody is suggesting making up random numbers based off feelings.

Then reparations for slavery are completely off the table. You can't measure the economic output of someone who died 150-400 years ago. There are major disputes about what a human life is worth now, when we know every possible detail about them.

> First off, if your dad is actually 25, you are fantastically intelligent for your age

I think you missed where I said "have had to pay" (meaning "when he was 25").

> But there is a way to pay off -- if nothing else -- the debt of unpaid hours.

Let's assume, first, that people are owed money that rightfully belonged to their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents. I would disagree with that, but I'll leave that aside for now.

How much are the following worth, in today's dollars?

- 1 hour of planting crops at 3pm on a sunny day in Alabama in February of 1802

- 1 hour of planting crops at 10am on a cloudy day in Georgia in March of 1791

- 1 hour of breastfeeding a slaver's baby

- 1 hour of cooking food for a 10-person family

Are those worth $5? Surely not, because minimum wage is higher than that. But that is what a lot of undocumented immigrants get paid for the same work, so maybe $5 is correct?

Or is it worth $50, because those people's bodies were in constant pain from beatings, over-work, malnutrition, and poor health care?

Let's say we settle on $25/hour. If we divide it up between that person's 1,000+ descendants, it's not much money. But then we have to consider the interest! Should we use the national rate of inflation? Should we just peg it to the adjusted dollar? Should we assume that money would've been invested in gold?

I think you see my point. There is no way to come up with a formula for any of this that makes any sense. And then once you get to the end and decide on a number, how do you decide who pays it? Should recent immigrants pay reparations for slavery? Should a rural, white meth addict lying in their own vomit pay reparations for all of their "privileges"?

It makes far, far more sense to just have a strong society safety net and not try to figure out what events 100, 200, or 500 years ago resulted in someone's current situation.

> if there is one thing the world respects about Germany, it's that they owned up. We can too

The example of Germany supports my point. Here are the major differences:

- Germany was forced to pay most of its reparations by the Allies

- Planning for German reparations began a few months after the war ended

- Many Germans were enslaved by the Allies as a form of reparation, and those people were then paid reparations

- Much of the rest of Germany's reparations were paid directly to Holocaust survivors[1] or their spouses or to Israel, not to millions of their descendants hundreds of years later[2]

The best number I can find for the total reparations paid by Germany is ~€60B, which translates to €4.3k for every living Jew (~14M) since 1945. I know that's not perfect, because some Holocaust survivors are dead and many living Jews are not descended from one, but bear with me.

If you look at that number yearly by person, you get €57/person/year.

That is not a meaningful amount of money compared to the consequences of slavery, even if you change it by a couple of orders of magnitude. Germany arguably owes Jewish people trillions of euros, not billions.

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/world/europe/for-60th-yea...

2. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/german-holocaust-repara...

3. https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/410502/23e348e9f5c6c0...

It seems as though you're saying that because we can't get a perfect estimate for cost, the next best guess is $0.

There's obviously a lot of tolerance on these estimates, but even with extreme tolerances $0 seems a bit low.

> There is no way to come up with a formula for any of this that makes any sense

The first step would be having a serious discussion about every question you raised. They're all good questions, and with some amount of investigation, yield closer and closer answers.

This is a daunting task -- no doubt -- but I see no reason why you should be opposed to it, or assume it's impossible.

> It seems as though you're saying that because we can't get a perfect estimate for cost, the next best guess is $0.

Correct.

> This is a daunting task -- no doubt -- but I see no reason why you should be opposed to it, or assume it's impossible.

I'm opposed to trying to adjudicate a distant and poorly-documented past in order to take money from one group and give it to another. That's why the best estimate, for me, is $0. The first thing to do is to do no more harm, and as we see from the enslaved-Germans example, reparations can end up being another injustice that needs to be repaired.

I am not opposed to fixing the unfair deficits caused by slavery, but I don't think we need to (or that it's ethical to) look at history to do that. We can simplify it to, "Who was born with fewer opportunities? Who has fewer opportunities now? Who is discriminated against now?"

In many cases, the most deeply affected parties will overlap with the people affected by the legacy of slavery. But we'll also cover people who had generations of near-slavery (e.g. white Appalachian sharecropper who became timber workers and then coal miners), as well as people are suffering deeply from modern atrocities like the opioid crisis.

I’m an immigrant, and I’ll never stand for any kind of reparations for descendants of former slaves. Invariably this will come out of tax dollars to which I’m contributing by way of income tax. Why should I be charged for wrongs - however horrible - in which neither myself nor my ancestors were involved? When there was still slavery in America, my people were enslaving members of their own ethnic group back in the old country. Forgive me for not wanting any part of this current dispute.

And to those who will certainly tell me that I’ve benefitted from the modern spoils of slavery: I beg to differ. My first decade in the US was all about climbing out of the pit of “you’re not white enough for us because you didn’t go to a top school”. That shit still haunts me to this day.

> Invariably this will come out of tax dollars to which I’m contributing by way of income tax.

This is no different than paying taxes for any number of other social programs, however its a singularly bad place to draw the line.

> Why should I be charged for wrongs - however horrible - in which neither myself nor my ancestors were involved?

Because you aren't being charged. The government that legalized and regulated slavery is being charged. This government is (one of) the legal institutions that permitted slavery and benefitted from slavery that still exists. Therefore they are responsible for satisfying legal claims that are still pending.

> When there was still slavery in America, my people were enslaving members of their own ethnic group back in the old country. Forgive me for not wanting any part of this current dispute.

If you don't want any part of it then you are free to remain neutral in discussions of this issue. By arguing against reparations you are participating in the dispute.

> And to those who will certainly tell me that I’ve benefitted from the modern spoils of slavery: I beg to differ. My first decade in the US was all about climbing out of the pit of “you’re not white enough for us because you didn’t go to a top school”.

That doesn't challenge the assertion that you benefitted from the accumulated capital that was in part built on the forced labor of slaves.

> That shit still haunts me to this day.

I'm truly sorry for your traumatic experience.

p.s. I've upvoted this comment because while I disagree with the substance, it raises important arguments that need to be responded to and the comment itself contributes to the discussion. I'd like to ask down voters to consider why they feel this comment needs to be suppressed because I disagree with their opinion on the value of the comment and its contribution to the discussion.

I’m also an immigrant, and I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. It’s not about “benefitting from the spoils of slavery.” It’s about having to pay taxes to fund any other kind of obligations that existed before you came here. The US still has outstanding bonds from the first bond issue 1790. It’s still paying pensions from the Spanish American war. If you move to Chicago, you’ll have to pay off pensions for people who retired decades before you moved there.

> My first decade in the US was all about climbing out of the pit of “you’re not white enough for us because you didn’t go to a top school”.

I likely do not understand what you mean here, because a casual reading of this seems ridiculous. Most white people do not go to top schools either.

On the flip side, if one were to list factors that play a role in becoming decently successful, going to a top school is fairly low on that list (as in most successful people didn't go to one either).

I'm probably not interpreting the comment as you intended, though.

> I’m an immigrant, and I’ll never stand for any kind of reparations for descendants of former slaves. Invariably this will come out of tax dollars to which I’m contributing by way of income tax. Why should I be charged for wrongs - however horrible - in which neither myself nor my ancestors were involved?

Why should you be a contributor to the wrongs of this country's past? Simple, because you are a member/resident of this country, and this country benefits from them. I could be wrong, but I don't see any complaints about paying of any war debt accrued by the US from entering WW II or the Vietnam war, but you also pay towards that. It's accepted that current us citizens who benefit from the previous actions of the country, also have responsiblity for the previous decisions of the country.

An enormous part of the reason why this country is so financially successful is because of slavery and stealing wages for so long. That's why the US was an agricultural powerhouse, that's why the north industrialized so quickly, that's why we became a major economic power in the 20th century.

And even you yourself admit you see all of those benefits, and reap them. You came to this country presumably for those exact reasons. You're as you say an immigrant, and the reason you chose to come here, and not stay where you were was because of exactly the benefits this country accrued by leaning heavily on slavery during it's critical period.

The fact you had negative experiences while here (and I'm sorry you did), doesn't invalidate or outweigh the fact that you came here to benefit from America's benefits, and that you have benefited from them.

American education does an incredibly poor job of covering the financial windfall of slaver in the US. And (extremely reasonably) people from other countries who move here never learned about it back home. To give some perspective, the value of "human capital" held as chattel slaves, was more valuable than all industrial and transportation capital in the entire country.[1] That's how much value was present. I'd highly recommend anyone who hasn't really read about slavery to really read about it. Unfortunately there was an intentional concerted effort in the middle of last century to downplay the scope and impact of slavery in the US and a lot of those vestiges are present because it was very successful.

There is way more here than the simplistic arguments that are made online in chat forums. I'd recommend looking into it. While not ideal, this essay is a decent place to start if you're curious. [2]

[1] - https://slate.com/business/2013/07/america-s-slave-wealth.ht... [2] - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas...

Slavery was not in the least a contribution to "financial success". It was very much a dysfunctional and failing system, for reasons that were made clear even by Adam Smith, who wrote in 1776 - and that are agreed upon by modern economists. What it did was create a huge unfair advantage for the few who could afford to "own" someone who had been enslaved - but that never translated to region-wide progress. Indeed, the part of the U.S. where slavery was widespread is still the most unequal today and the one with the most uninclusive, regressive, extractive culture and institutions (despite a very real change in outlook during the 1980s), and that's no coincidence.

'Slavery made economic sense' is a narrative that, until recently, you would only have heard from the likes of "Black-Israelite" conspiracy peddlers. Let's not give credence to such unscientific and misleading claims.

> Slavery was not in the least a contribution to "financial success"... What it did was create a huge unfair advantage for the few who could afford to "own" someone who had been enslaved

I think you have been given a very skewed view of the role that slavery played in our country's economic past. There have been long efforts to downplay the role of slavery, and there still are. Cotton was the US's #1 export from ~1800 through 1930 due to slavery, and then continuing into the extremely exploitive sharecropping. That's the core period our country developed - and the single export that brought in the most capital into this country. That continuous inflow of capital is also what made New York City the financial powerhouse it became. [1]

Slavery wasn't a just for the few. One of the number one ways that people mislead with slavery is by trying to show the percentage of the slaves divided by the total population in 1860. That's extremely misleading, as individuals didn't own slaves, families did. The same way measuring what percentage of families own their home is accurate, not individuals that own the home, as only one in the family typically owns the home.

There were 15 slave states in 1860. Of the top 10 states, in all of them at least 25% of families owned slaves. With the top two states South Carolina and Mississippi topping out at 46% and 49% of families. Almost half the families owned slaves. And that's ignoring everyone else in the south who didn't own slaves, but participated in the slave trade - and those who rented slaves for labor but didn't technically "own them". [2]

On top of that of the top 5 states owning slaves, enslaved people ranged from over 40% of the population in Georgia, to almost 60% of the entire population of the state of South Carolina. [3]

Slavery and the white supremacy views it was built on, were an absolutely core part of the first part of this country's existence - culturally, economically, politically. Slavery wasn't a niche occurrence only for the elite - and especially so for the white South. It was disgusting, it was violent, it was immoral and it was everywhere. It didn't play a minimal role. The idea that a few wealthy elite slave owners "tricked" the rest of the southern population to go to war for them is a farce. The entire south gathered up to go to war because white supremacy was the culture of their land.

It's taken this country a long time to try to undo that work - and we still haven't finished...

But to downplay Slavery is to also downplay what was taken from Black Americans, and how much that theft built this early country.

1. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cr... 2. https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/08/07/percent-of-whites-own... 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_United_States_census

> Cotton was the US's #1 export from ~1800 through 1930 due to slavery

Wait, you're making a very different claim than what I was talking about. I agree that it probably made some sense to have some kind of plantation economy in the South, and that, as a matter of fact the plantations the South did have were based on enslaved labor. And for sure, there are interesting debates to have about the unacknowledged contribution that's inherent in that. But slavery was never a necessary part of that successful economy; indeed, it's quite physically possible to have plantations that employ free laborers as opposed to relying on slaves!

I don't think that interpretation of history is quite so strong, for a few reasons. While buying enough slaves to run a plantation was extremely expensive - buying a single slave to have for household purposes was not unobtainable or rare at all. Since slave status was inherited and the "one-drop" rule ensured it tended to get inherited, it was extremely common for less-financially well-off slave owners to simply rape an enslaved woman (multiple times over her lifetime) and then to either sell his mixed children, or commonly - to gift them as slaves to his white children when they come of age. This is a hugely valuable financial advantage for those who inherit a slave, and having a slave made them more valuable as a spouse as well, meaning they could increase their wealth more by marrying better than they could have without a slave. Nearly every white person from the south, has a family member who owned a slave - even if you would never guess by their economic status today. I'm from the south myself, and even though my great-grandparents were dirt poor in the mountains, I don't doubt someone somewhere back in time owned a slave. It really was just so common that the probability is a near certainty.

Also, when slavery was at it's height, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia were far more prosperous regions than they eventually became post-civil war. The south in general was more financially well-off during the time of slavery than it has been since - and you can read primary sources from the time and region saying as much. I can point you towards primary sources from elected officials of the time period saying as much - that they knew slavery was evil, but they also knew it was the source of economic and social stability that they enjoyed. The institution of slavery itself did not directly lead to economic fall of the southern states - rather it was the tensions from having a nation with both slaveholding states and non-slaveholding states, and the south's extremely strong incentive to protect their advantageous status even at the cost of war.

When the war did happen, the civil-war-related destruction that happened in the south (ie, the burning of Atlanta), had an equally dramatic impact and the outcome that we see today. Decades of slavery were certainly impactful, but so were the effects of the civil war, reconstruction, the great migration, and later cycles of industrialization, which tended to reach the south last due to network effects (there was no impetus to branch out from the skilled workers available up north... until unions took hold at least). All of those effects are more recent, and more relevant to the economic conditions today.

Additionally, the cultural regressiveness you speak of is closely tied to the Great Awakening and the particularly conservative religious denominations that became regionally dominant - and notably, these denominations had, and still have strong pull on southern white and black communities alike. The south actually had a reputation for being quite a fun and "sinful" place before that. My own state, NC, founded the first public university in the world (UNC Chapel Hill) - a paradoxically very progressive institution - despite being founded by slavers during a period of widespread slavery.

So understanding inequality and culture that exists in South, both now and then, and today is a complex thing. I would strongly caution trying to reduce it down that completely.

"Achieving reparations" is difficult language for me to accept. It is "thinking past the sale" that does not treat the subject with the necessary fair-minded big picture consideration.

It's not clear that reparations are a good idea in practice, or something to be "achieved," or even strived for (they might do more harm in practice to the group they intend to protect, as many well-intentioned and politically extremist ideologies do) not to mention any considerations involving whether it would be possible to sustain, or affordable, etc.

Be careful with your thinking if you care about being even-handed with your empathy. Being empathetic is a fantastic thing, but don't allow cynical people to hijack your empathy.

> It's not clear that reparations are a good idea in practice, or something to be "achieved," or even strived for (they might do more harm in practice to the group they intend to protect, as many well-intentioned and politically extremist ideologies do) not to mention any considerations involving whether it would be possible to sustain, or affordable, etc.

These are important considerations that impact directly on the form that reparations "should" take. However they are orthogonal to the merits of the claim for reparations.

> It's not clear that reparations are a good idea in practice, or something to be "achieved," or even strived for (they might do more harm in practice to the group they intend to protect,

This is a very patronizing argument. If someone breaks into your bank account and steals your cash, then later is caught. There is no valid line of reasoning that goes "well I'll only give the money back if you tell me how you plan to spend it first". "Oh, you planned to spend it all on bubble gum and sweets? Then no I don't need to give it back, because I think that might do you more harm than good."

Argue on the merits of the topic, not based on knowing what's best for people.

Well, by your own analogy. If both you and the robber have been dead for 300+ years would it make sense to make the robbers family pay your descendants for it? Keep in mind none of the people had contact with anyone remotely involved with the original robbery or had any way to influence it or impact it. Should the sons pay for the sins of the fathers? Pretty sure I could find someone in your ancestral line that commit a crime, can I convict you for it?

So, yeah, the merits are kinda low to.

Great discussion, let's continue.

So my dad goes and steals your dad's land. He give me the land as his son. I split it in half and give half to a friend of mine. The investigation occurs and determine this land was stolen and should be returned. I don't think the argument of, "sorry won't return it because I didn't steal it, my dad did" holds much water. Nor the argument of, "nope I won't return it because a friend of mine that has nothing to do with the theft is benefiting from it" holds much water either as reasons for your family to not get their land returned.

And related, possession of stolen goods is a fairly common legal concept. Regardless of penalty, at minimum once discovered the goods are returned, even if they'd previously be sold or given to someone else.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possession_of_stolen_goods#Uni...

Sure, except randomly distribute the goods, and then forcefully extract payback from many who were never involved, and many who fought to prevent the theft, and now you're getting closer.

Will there later be reparations for the reparations taken now from uninvolved parties since the point of reparations is that stealing labor and wealth is wrong and must be corrected via payment in later generations? If we take from them we're perpetuating the same sort of theft? I agree if we were omniscient it would be "right," but we're far far from that.

Also, let's say there's a reparation payment, but it doesn't rectify inequality, because there are more systemic problems at play, like local tax revenue funding local schools, so poor towns have poor schools. After "reparations," you don't think voters will think "we paid reparations, stop complaining."

If the purpose is "righting a wrong" I think the tool is too blunt and will create many more wrongs.

If the purpose is to "fix inequality", I think it won't address the underlying structural problems, but will "check the box" and absolve responsibilities.

Slavery only counts as stolen good if you still consider black people property :)

Your comment is incorrect. It was their wages that were stolen that we're discussing.

This might come as a surprise to you, but being a slave is not in fact a job. If there were any wages to be stolen in the first place they wouldn't be slaves. But considering how many times you've been wrong and are just moving the goalpost to keep arguing and are behind a throwaway I assume at this point your just trying to waste time and lowkey troll.

1) Slavery ended 150 years ago, not 300.

2) Second and third-generation descendents of slaves are still alive. In other words, people who conceivably would have benefited directly from their grandparents or great-grandparents receiving substantial reparations.

3) Reparations have been called for for more recent attacks on Black American rights and economic wellbeing; discriminatory and destructive public policy that dates back decades but that also goes up to, at least, the predatory lending practices backed by the government in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, which saw black-owned wealth in America cut in half.

People who are holding real estate exposure in the US are the primary beneficiaries.

Then you add in redlining, and it starts to look systemtic.

So the cure should be appropriate to the disease, make home ownership practical, affordable, and (if you are into reparations) subsidized.

Or at least as subsidized as being a rich person is in the mortgage origination process (via that stealth socio-economic test that is your FICO score).

Subsidized home ownership? Don't tell Thomas Sowell that idea.

How would that work?

You make it easier for people to own, then the prices increase. Do you subsidize more? If so, then it's just 2008 again.

Just have Fannie and Freddie give preference to those loans in their purchasing decisions. You'd end up with weird MBS based on population performance as opposed to regional or time based, but at least then you can bid up the mortgages (and down the yields faced by consumers of color).

It can be done indirectly. Fund infrastructure that is needed for housing starts, do other things to remove obstacles to housing starts, etc.

Let’s set up a state guaranteed mortgage guarantor so the banks can relax their landing standards. And let’s call it Fannie Mae, or perhaps Freddie Mac...

Those are more or less direct subsidies.

Probably would not end well.

https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/collins-v-mnuchi...

Why are we talking about Fannie and Freddie? They are direct subsidies!

I'm talking about building power lines and wastewater plants and shit like that. Encouraging counties to adopt zoning that simplifies residential construction. Etc.

> (via that stealth socio-economic test that is your FICO score).

Fun fact: First thing you learn from when moving to USA is to get a credit card immediately. Start working on that score. Even if you don't intend to stay, just in case you change your mind.

My first credit card 5 years ago had a $1000 limit. And only if I kept my bank balance above $1000.

Yes, having even just a starting point for numbers on this would be very helpful. Part of the issue is people won't even countenance the concept of reparations, so no one gets as far as saying, well if your great grandfather was enslaved for X years under system Y, here's an estimate of the value of their labor that was stolen by that system.

What are the limits? Who will be excepted? How will it be enforced? All good questions! But we can hardly answer them if we refuse to engage with the idea of reparations to begin with.

> But we can hardly answer them if we refuse to engage with the idea of reparations to begin with.

That's because the first order of business is to demonstrate that reparations are even a good idea. Engage with those who don't like the idea, and address the concerns they raise, if you can; then deal with minutae.

And the second order of business assuming it is even a good idea would be to determine who should pay. The answer "taxpayers" is an absolute non-starter. My family only showed up in this country in the mid 80s and have zero responsibility for things that happened well over 100 years ago. We also don't live in states where slavery was ever a thing.

> My family only showed up in this country in the mid 80s and have zero responsibility for things that happened well over 100 years ago.

I guess, here is a simple non-rhetorical thought question: Why should your family get any of the benefits of this country's past? I don't know you or where you/your family immigrated from, but your family came here for the benefits of the US. Maybe the US was a wealthier country than where your family left, or maybe more stable, or maybe they felt there was more opportunity for economic mobility. Those benefits/properties where present before your family decided to move, so why should you benefit from them?

Note, I'm actually pro-immigration and support people moving here, but I think it's a good exercise to walk through. All of those benefits were accrued before your family came here, and yet your family gets to benefit from them. Why? As you said, they had zero responsibility for things that happened before they arrived.

So by the same token, if the country had both assets and debts before you arrived, why shouldn't the logic that says you and your family should take on and gain from those assets that pre-dated you, also not mean that you should take on the associated debts?

I can't think of a reason why someone immigrating should only take on the benefits of the assets but be excluded from the liabilities. But am open to discussion.

> We also don't live in states where slavery was ever a thing.

That’s not really... likely. Even if your state wasn’t a ‘state’ Pre-abolishion, there was slavery there. The history of slavery in North America did not start at Plymouth Rock.

> And the second order of business assuming it is even a good idea would be to determine who should pay.

Thats easy, the same government that permitted and regulated slavery is the first defendant. After that any other legal institution that still exists in the same form (universities, state and city governments, non-profits, etc.).

> We also don't live in states where slavery was ever a thing.

They made the cross country railroad on slave labor. Pretty sure every state has benefitted from rail traffic.

> That's because the first order of business is to demonstrate that reparations are even a good idea.

The first order of business is to demonstrate the validity of the claim. The benefit of the reparation is dependent on the form of the reparation itself.

Literally paying a person for their time. If an employer was stealing money from their employees, why would you have to demonstrate they should have to pay off the debt? There is a measurable financial debt here.

Also, it sets a precedent: if you care about your decedents and progeny at all, there is nothing to gain from cheating. You may benefit and die before repercussions occur, but all debts must be paid eventually. Justice is hard, but not when it comes to hours worked vs hours paid.

If that's the principle involved, then I think, though IANAL, the statute of limitations applies. If my employer from 20 years ago cheated me of some pay, I'm pretty sure he's safe from litigation at this point.

> if you care about your decedents and progeny at all, there is nothing to gain from cheating. You may benefit and die before repercussions occur, but all debts must be paid eventually.

I really hope you're not suggesting that we set a precedent of digging through history to find old debts we might be owed.

> the statute of limitations applies.

The statute of limitations is a law. We are talking about a moral claim that supercedes the text of laws. Remember this is from a time when slavery itself was legal.

Also consider there is no statute of limitations for some crimes including murder.

> I really hope you're not suggesting that we set a precedent of digging through history to find old debts we might be owed.

I think he's more suggesting we not set a precedent of permitting people to benefit financially from atrocities if they can run out the clock.

More important, the statute of limitations is a law that’s established at the discretion of the legislature for policy reasons. There’s no inherent moral right to a statute of limitations

Engaging with those who don't like the idea is a fool's errand, because a lot of these people will just cherry-pick whatever objection they can think of in bad faith. And even in good faith, people who don't like the idea all have different reasons. Start with the root axiom "Slavery is wrong", people will be happy to engage with you on that. Disregard them and move on to the next syllogism, you'll have a different set of people objecting.

One thing that might be helpful, if I'm in favor and you're opposed, then maybe identify one obstacle - it can be as big as you wish - where if resolved, you'd be in favor of reparations. Then maybe that is worth engaging with.

> One thing that might be helpful, if I'm in favor and you're opposed, then maybe identify one obstacle - it can be as big as you wish - where if resolved, you'd be in favor of reparations. Then maybe that is worth engaging with.

On the contrary; if I represent the status quo and you represent a new idea, the onus is on you to defend it. It's your responsibility. Put it out there. Say exactly what your thesis is, and back it up, and defend it. Sunlight is the best disinfectant - anything about your ideas that are indefensible will be shown to be so, and what's left will be gold.

To make my point via reductio ad absurdum, let's flip the script and use something hyperbolic: you represent the status quo, and I represent (heaven forbid) some new variation of racial cleansing. But, I declare to those opposed, "engaging with those who don't like the idea [of racial cleansing] is a fool's errand, because a lot of these people will just cherry-pick whatever objection they can think of in bad faith." So, I say to you, the skeptical defendent of the status quo, if you don't like the idea of racial cleansing, "then maybe identify one obstacle - it can be as big as you wish - where if resolved, you'd be in favor of [exterminating a race]."

To me, flipping your proposition on its head like that makes it pretty obvious that it's unsatisfactory as the starting point of an intellectual discussion. It even tends to beg the question: you've made your position the 'null hypothesis'. The status quo should be the null hypothesis.

> And even in good faith, people who don't like the idea all have different reasons. Start with the root axiom "Slavery is wrong", people will be happy to engage with you on that. Disregard them and move on to the next syllogism, you'll have a different set of people objecting.

Yes, exactly. Your job is to answer every set of people who don't like your idea. Just because you believe that this new thing is moral and right does not make it so, and it is the acme of hubris to distain to justify your proposed actions.

The onus is not necessarily on me to convince you. Reasoned arguments exist to convince people, but there isn't any sense in expecting to convince 100% of people, including my racist drunk Uncle Harry. The bar you're setting with "Your job is to answer every set of people who don't like your idea," is essentially saying that change should not happen at all unless there is unanimous acceptance.

You do realize that every civilization that has ever existed has both enslaved others and been enslaved in the past, right? Where do your reparations end? Are you going to forcefully take money from me because African Americans were enslaved generations ago, but then forcefully have money taken from them for the other Africans and other races they themselves enslaved in Africa before that? Where does it end?

Do you honestly think that forcefully stealing money from someone at the threat of imprisonment if they don't pay is really going to fly? Do you think putting a gun to my head and taking money from me really makes sense when my ancestors emigrated here only a couple generations ago? How do you foresee this working? How do you foresee this helping anything?

Of course my language is extreme, but that's what taxes and similar payments are. It's backed by the force of the government and if I don't pay, eventually someone with a gun will come to put me in prison, and if I refuse, that gun will be pointed at me.

I'm also curious how far back these reparations are supposed to go, and where exactly the responsibility is supposed to lie. Should the people who 'employed' the slaves be responsible, or should the people who enslaved and sold them also be considered at fault?

If the second, then note a lot of slaves were initially captured and sold to white slavers by their own kind. [1]

[1] http://www.understandingslavery.com/index.php-option=com_con...

> I'm also curious how far back these reparations are supposed to go, and where exactly the responsibility is supposed to lie. Should the people who 'employed' the slaves be responsible, or should the people who enslaved and sold them also be considered at fault?

All those people are dead. The only entities left to sue are legal entities that aren't natural persons.

> If the second, then note a lot of slaves were initially captured and sold to white slavers by their own kind.

Then governments, corporations, etc. in Africa and Europe can be held to the same standard.

Well, doing something like this right would obviously be a big discussion.

But IMO, if we can figure out how much time/money was stolen and who benefitted the most from it, we can start to have some idea of what's fair.

I'm a big fan of UBI as well, and it'd make a lot of sense to have the ancestors of slaves be the first to get onto UBI. But, obviously, this is a group decision and should be based off logic and records; not feelings.

I want to know the principles involved, and the logic behind them, before we talk about calculating backpay. Those should be stated and defended successfully before anything else.

For example, there's examples (IIRC) of former slaves owning slaves themselves; how is that addressed? What moral principles are in play, which can be logically applied to figure out if such a person's progeny receive reparations?

> I'm a big fan of UBI as well, and it'd make a lot of sense to have the ancestors* of slaves be the first to get onto UBI. But, obviously, this is a group decision and should be based off logic and records; not feelings.

*descendants

The same issues that make UBI a bad idea will probably preclude the individual payment approach to reparations

> Do you honestly think that forcefully stealing money from someone at the threat of imprisonment if they don't pay is really going to fly?

Yeah its called taxation.

> You do realize that every civilization that has ever existed has both enslaved others and been enslaved in the past, right?

I'm not convinced that this is true. do you have any documentation?

> Where do your reparations end? Are you going to forcefully take money from me because African Americans were enslaved generations ago, but then forcefully have money taken from them for the other Africans and other races they themselves enslaved in Africa before that? Where does it end?

Claims are against the legal institutions that still exist. People aren't held responsible for the sins of their ancestors, rather the same institutions that benefitted still exist and can be sued for damages. There's a pending claim against them.

> Do you think putting a gun to my head and taking money from me really makes sense when my ancestors emigrated here only a couple generations ago?

You didn't know that we collect taxes here when you immigrated?

> Of course my language is extreme, but that's what taxes and similar payments are. It's backed by the force of the government and if I don't pay, eventually someone with a gun will come to put me in prison, and if I refuse, that gun will be pointed at me.

If you're opposed to taxation, arguing against reparations is probably the worst possible way to make your point. Slavery and taxation are quite similar (some would say the difference matters but those people are pro-tax).

The following is all just an opinion, and obviously this type of subject is a discussion. Doubly so because I'm white.

I don't think anyone should pay any more than they benefitted from slavery.

The average person has no ancestors who owned slaves, and the only benefits they got were things like cheaper goods and services. Added up over a lifetime, it's probably not a lot.

But some people come from ancestors who made a LOT of money off slavery, and the benefits of that have been passed down to them one way or another.

So I think different people should be in different brackets based off how much they benefitted from slavery, and those brackets should be proportion of wealth tax over 20-30 years. Not so much to bankrupt anyone, but enough to pay the off the debt.

Also, I think it should be treated as the alpha version of UBI. Basically, the ancestors of slaves should be the first to get on the list for UBI because they're kind of opposites of each-other.

> Doubly so because I'm white

This is a logical fallacy (though a popular one). An idea is either good or bad. The traits of the person speaking the idea are irrelevant, and do not make a good idea bad, or a bad idea good.

Further, an idea doesn't become more or less "subject to discussion" as a result of the race of the person speaking it.

I agree strongly with what I'm saying, but seriously: there's a good chance of bias here, so it really should be a discussion including all sides.

I'm basically claiming, ofc I think my idea is good, but I really don't want to assume it.

We should probably also consider charging the Europeans that made vast wealth shipping slaves, and the Africans that profited from capturing and selling their countrymen.

Charging the individual Europeans / middle eastern people involved, or the nations?

In the latter case, we can probably start collecting our reparations for the Barbary slave trades from the Arabs, and probably even make money! (Reparation arbitrage).

I accept petrol or petrodollars. Check my bio for the paypal link.

> The average person has no ancestors who owned slaves, and the only benefits they got were things like cheaper goods and services. Added up over a lifetime, it's probably not a lot.

The average person benefitted from compound accumulation of capital. After hundreds of years of compound interest, its probably unfathomably large.

> But some people come from ancestors who made a LOT of money off slavery, and the benefits of that have been passed down to them one way or another.

If those people can be identified then someone may lodge a claim against their assets. From what I learned in Black World Studies, the fruits of slavery are largely considered to have been spread through society in a way that can't be traced and reconstructed because everything is tainted.

> Do you honestly think that forcefully stealing money from someone at the threat of imprisonment if they don't pay is really going to fly?

How many American citizens went to prison because they refused to send in their contribution to the reparation funds for Japanese internment?

> You do realize that every civilization that has ever existed has both enslaved others and been enslaved in the past, right?

Do you realize that's an extraordinary claim? You have proof for this, right?

This seems relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery

Obviously GP's claim is a dumb one, because all you have to do is say "Here is one counter example, you're wrong". But looking at that page makes it very clear that slavery is a big part of most of world history.

Well.. slaves comes from slavs how have been sold by Tatars. Here in my Slavic country we even have some classical books that write about slavery of our people

Ah yes the two genders: American and Tatar.

Not defending that guy's claim, but relevant: do you know where the word 'slave' comes from?

Simon Webb is interesting on slavery history, I'm waiting for his book on this topic to come out in digital format https://youtu.be/qhw1ATYxWcQ

I know they don't teach real history in school or in the media anymore and you have an entirely skewed perception of history at this point, but it's the truth. Or course the word "every" is probably too much, because there's been exceptions. Just pick any random country/civilization and google "history of slavery in X". For example England, Ireland, Turkey, any country you enter, you'll find a history of it.

> Ireland

Warning; while there really was slavery in Ireland at one time (indeed Dublin was one of the biggest markets in Europe before the Normans suppressed it in the 12th century), if you Google for this you are likely to get a good bit of nonsense. Decent summary here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_slaves_myth

> But reparations should be paid, if for nothing else, at least for the unpaid hours.

You must be young to speak with such certainty.

Post-slavery, black sharecroppers basically made nothing after expenses. So how much was their time actually worth? (An economist will ask this.)

Post-slavery, norhern states, which had no slaves, paid the cost of welfare for millions of black families. So how does that factor in?

Since there's intermarriage in America, what's a quanta of African blood? How much does one get paid per 1/32? (This is referring to the heated race arguments of the 1800s and 1900s.)

Do you have any experience with the above? My family is from the Detroit area, so I'm one of few posters on HN that actually does know something about these issues.

The US paid a heavy price during the civil war, one of the biggest issues being related to slavery. Do the northern states get reparations for freeing the slaves?

That's the problem when you drag history into modern times. One of the biggest advantages that the US has over other countries is that we don't continue to fight the same battles over and over.

Even before corona, black familiies in America struggled greatly with maintaining households and educating their children. Instead of virtue signalling, why don't you contribute to solving today's enormous problems?

> Post-slavery, black sharecroppers basically made nothing after expenses. So how much was their time actually worth? (An economist will ask this.)

How much was the labor of slaves worth to the slaveowners? surely you're not arguing it was worth nothing?

> Post-slavery, norhern states, which had no slaves, paid the cost of welfare for millions of black families. So how does that factor in?

The price of social programs don't factor in at all.

> Since there's intermarriage in America, what's a quanta of African blood? How much does one get paid per 1/32? (This is referring to the heated race arguments of the 1800s and 1900s.)

This will come up if the reparations take the form of payments to individuals.

> Do you have any experience with the above? My family is from the Detroit area, so I'm one of few posters on HN that actually does know something about these issues.

Thank heavens we live in a country where people are allowed to have opinions without demonstrating the right to those opinions on the basis of heritage.

> The US paid a heavy price during the civil war, one of the biggest issues being related to slavery. Do the northern states get reparations for freeing the slaves?

Why would they?

> That's the problem when you drag history into modern times. One of the biggest advantages that the US has over other countries is that we don't continue to fight the same battles over and over.

Sadly you can't get rid of the effects of history by choosing to forget about it.

> Even before corona, black familiies in America struggled greatly with maintaining households and educating their children. Instead of virtue signalling, why don't you contribute to solving today's enormous problems?

This is unhelpful.

Do the people who had their property stolen by the Nazis have to pay the US for liberating the death camps?

Yeah, no. There are simple answers to several of your questions.

Now that you mention it. Modern Germany should pay the US enormous sums in reparations for our role in destroying Nazi Germany, saving Western Europe (which Russia did not do, Russia enslaved half of Europe), freeing people from Nazi death camps, propping up a post-war democratic Germany against the conquering monster to the East.

Not just the US of course. Britain and France among others are owed a lot more in reparations for what Germany did and the long-term consequences.

The US got repaid - only in part - for its war lending. It has never been paid reparations for its losses in WW2 (including 400,000 military deaths).

What's the reparations tally for 400,000 dead, going by the numbers thrown around these days? $10 trillion? Germany and Japan can figure out the split on that and then write some big fat checks to the families in question.

You're joking but what you describe is pretty much the Treaty of Versailles, which was actually one of the triggers of WW2.

edit: expected downvotes of course; nobody dares to engage on this particular discussion about the vast sums the Europeans must be made to pay for their evil deeds (which they've skirted for hundreds of years now, like cowards)

> Next we need to figure out who profited the most from slaves and where that money is today.

The most? The Europeans. Where is the money? It's in London and Amsterdam among a few other former empires.

The Europeans transported around 12.5 millions slaves to the Americas. They owe so much in reparations it will bankrupt half the nations in Western Europe.

It's very interesting how the Europeans - who were responsible for African slavery in the Americas - never want to talk about it and how nobody in the US ever asks any questions about how much the Europeans are going to pay.

The Europeans transported close to five million slaves to Brazil, nearly ten times as many slaves as were transported to the territory that became the US. One can imagine the reparations tally just for that alone to be in the tens of trillions of dollars.

Britain and the Netherlands should just go ahead and write a check equal to 10% of their entire national wealth to African-Americans. That might get things started on the path to justice. All of the assets of the British throne should be liquidated as part of the process and put into the reparations pot.

There were three primary groups of beneficiaries - planters in the America's, slave traders in Europe, and the Kingdoms in Africa who were among the procurers and sellers.

The European empires had all the power: they had the military dominance, they had the means, they had the transport, they had the economic controls, and they benefitted the most accordingly. They also spent centuries torturing Africa.

12.5 million Africans don't end up enslaved and heading to the Americas without the European empires making it happen.

The US owes a lot for its part, no question (what I'm saying is not a reduction in the responsibility of the US, I'm properly adding the Europeans to it). The Europeans owe that much more, including for the other 12 million slaves in the rest of the Americas (which, again, nobody ever wants to talk about re reparations, not under any circumstances). Every discussion is always about the US paying reparations. The Europeans were primarily responsible, the US didn't exist yet and banned the import of slaves as one of its first major actions post formation in January 1808. The US has spent two centuries dealing with the consequences of what the European powers did. We have had to deal with the consequences of their slave trade, while they've skirted it almost entirely.

What consequences have the Europeans suffered over the past two centuries, for what they did? Almost nothing. It's long past time for the Europeans to pay, big time.

It will bankrupt parts of Western Europe. That's how big the reparations number very obviously is.

99% of European didn't have anything to do with this trade and slavery was progressively forbidden on the territory of nearly all European countries during middle age (since 1315 for France for example but also in other countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_medieval_Europe).

All big European revolutions after 1789 had claims to stop slavery in overseas territory. So lots of European people have actually fought a to put an end to this long before Americans. Europeans were also victims from slavery from North Africa and Ottoman Empire at the same time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Ottoman_Empire).

Kings of the time obviously use this trade as an instrument of power but it was not something that had a meaningful impact on life of ordinary peoples.

You are just inventing an alternate history to find someone to dislike.

It's pretty meaningless to say that slavery was outlawed in most European countries for hundreds of years, even though some had colonies around the world until well into the 1900s. European countries just outsourced the slavery and called it empire building.

There is a lot of difference. Morally, why European people should be responsible of regime that oppressed them and against they rebel multiple times ? Economically, European peasants that were the great majority of population didn't get any advantage of all of this, and some of them in southern/eastern Europe were victims of similar behaviour from other countries. Why someone from south of Italy whose ancestor were enslaved by Ottomans should pay for crimes of kings of Britain, Spain and Portugal ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com