{"id":38470,"date":"2026-05-22T13:54:11","date_gmt":"2026-05-22T13:54:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.duck9.com\/blog\/?p=38470"},"modified":"2026-05-22T09:55:03","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T13:55:03","slug":"slavery-is-a-bad-business-model","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.duck9.com\/blog\/slavery-is-a-bad-business-model\/","title":{"rendered":"Slavery is a Bad Business Model"},"content":{"rendered":"
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La esclavitud no desapareci\u00f3 porque la gente se volvi\u00f3 buena. Eso es lo que te ense\u00f1an en el colegio y es b\u00e1sicamente falso. Desapareci\u00f3 porque result\u00f3 ser un p\u00e9simo negocio. Y la econom\u00eda lo descubri\u00f3 antes que la filosof\u00eda moral. Pensalo un segundo. Un esclavo no tiene<\/div>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
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Miguel Hern\u00e1ndez (@miguelhzv) 239 likes \u00b7 14 replies<\/font><\/a><\/div>\n
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Slavery didn\u2019t disappear because laws forbid the practice or that people became suddenly more moral.<\/div>\n
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\u201cWhat they teach you in school\u201d about slavery is all false.<\/div>\n
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Slavery disappeared because slavery turned out to be a lousy business model.<\/div>\n
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And the economy figured it out before moral philosophy did.<\/div>\n
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Think about it for a second.<\/div>\n
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A slave has no reason to produce beyond the minimum that avoids punishment.<\/div>\n
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He doesn\u2019t take care of the tools because they\u2019re not his.<\/div>\n
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He doesn\u2019t warn you when something breaks because warning you could backfire on him.<\/div>\n
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He doesn\u2019t learn the trade because learning the trade does him no good.<\/div>\n
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All the information and incentive problems that state planning has, slavery had them before, and worse.<\/div>\n
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Robert Fogel documented it with data in *Time on the Cross*, won the Nobel for it, and the conclusion was uncomfortable for everyone: slavery in the U.S. South was locally profitable only under very specific conditions of extensive production and low technical complexity.<\/div>\n
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As soon as those conditions changed with industrialization, the system collapsed economically before any army showed up to free anyone.<\/div>\n
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The free worker has reason to show up early, take care of the machine, and warn when something breaks.<\/div>\n
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The slave has reason to do exactly the opposite.<\/div>\n
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It\u2019s not that slavery was bad, though it was.<\/div>\n
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It\u2019s that it was inefficient in a way no overseer could fix.<\/div>\n
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Every system based on coercion carries its own destruction inside, not because it\u2019s immoral but because it cannot adapt to the new information, feedback and changing inputs it needs to optimize<\/div>\n
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Reality sends the bill anyway.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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La esclavitud no desapareci\u00f3 porque la gente se volvi\u00f3 buena. Eso es lo que te ense\u00f1an en el colegio y es b\u00e1sicamente falso. Desapareci\u00f3 porque result\u00f3 ser un p\u00e9simo negocio. Y la econom\u00eda lo descubri\u00f3 antes que la filosof\u00eda moral. Pensalo un segundo. Un esclavo no tiene Miguel Hern\u00e1ndez (@miguelhzv) 239 likes \u00b7 14 replies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":38471,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.duck9.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.duck9.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.duck9.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.duck9.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.duck9.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38470"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.duck9.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38470\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.duck9.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38471"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.duck9.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.duck9.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.duck9.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}