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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>I tried to compute an estimate of the current percentage of the US population that's forced labor vs. at the peak of the pre-abolition slave trade

Wikipedia says

>According to the latest available data at the World Prison Brief on May 7, 2023, the United States has the sixth highest incarceration rate in the world, at 531 people per 100,000

531 people per 100,000 works out to about half a percent. Meanwhile during slavery in the US, wikipedia says

>The slaves of the colonial era were unevenly distributed: 14,867 lived in New England, where they were three percent of the population; 34,679 lived in the mid-Atlantic colonies, where they were six percent of the population; and 347,378 in the five Southern Colonies, where they were 31 percent of the population.

Even in low slavery areas, the slavery rate is higher than current incarceration rates by several fold.

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Looking at the Colonial era is looking at slavery ~300 years before it peaked just before the Civil War. Therefore, the numbers you give for the Colonial times don't have anything to do with the conversation.

Yes, this user grotesquely underrepresented the scale of chattel slavery in America at the peak of the American slave economy. The original commenter is still completely wrong if you look at the 1860 census.

The first user made a wild, incorrect guess, and the rest of this subthread shows just how badly that can spoil discussion quality on a forum like this. Fortunately, someone linked an earlier discussion up at the top.

they mean absolute numbers

Their choice of the word “percentage” is incongruent with meaning “absolute.”

Are we reading the same comment? OP said

>I tried to compute an estimate of the current percentage of the US population that's forced labor vs. at the peak of the pre-abolition slave trade, and from what I can tell, it's currently higher than it ever was back then.

It's explicitly talking about "percentage" at the start. It would be weird if they silently switched to absolute numbers afterwards.

i read it as percentage applied to the first half, but not the second -- perhaps only on the grounds that to distribute the word "percentage" would make the claim obviously false.

Whether false by percentage or not, I'm not sure relative percentages are of that much importance. Surely the hundreds of thousands of american soliders dying in the US civil war wouldnt be relieved to hear that perhaps more black people were enslaved today, only to feel their sacrifce justified when hearing it was a mere 0.5%

The 13th amendment explicitly excludes prisoners. This shouldn't come as a surprise to any civil war soldier.

i think the post civil war era of America would be horrifying to many who died precisely to avoid it, their deaths rendered effectively pointless for at least a century

They are also wrong by absolute numbers.

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