In a notable departure from its usual practice, the Nobel committee in Sweden has this year awarded the economics prize to someone who is actually interesting and worth reading.
Claudia Goldin, a Harvard professor, was praised by the committee for her work on the economic history of women in the workforce.
But her long career has produced research on other fascinating and important topics, as well.
That includes papers showing the critical role that American education, from secondary schools to land-grant universities, and including the GI Bill, has played in the country’s economic success.
That’s something worth dwelling on today, as U.S. colleges price an increasing number of students out of the market — even as some of those same colleges debase their own educational standards and values.
But what first captivated me about Goldin’s research was something she wrote more than 40 years ago that today is widely overlooked.
It’s research that is fascinating, and important, and covers a critical issue in American history — but which is likely to get a lot less attention from the usual suspects in the establishment media, not least because it doesn’t fit their beloved narrative.
The research in question was about the devastating economic cost to the United States — North and South alike — of the Civil War. Writing in the Journal of Economic History in 1975, Goldin and co-author Frank Lewis looked at everything from government war spending, to the destruction of buildings, infrastructure and farms, to the lost economic consumption resulting from the deaths of some 620,000 Americans,
The total sum, Goldin and Lewis calculated, was $15 billion in 1861 prices.
Here’s why this is so interesting: That sum is nearly five times the total estimated peak “market value” of U.S. slavery in 1860.
In total, the U.S. Census reported, 4 million people were enslaved inside the U.S. in 1860. The average market price of a slave peaked, at that same time, at $800, according to the government’s Historical Statistics of the United States. That creates an estimated peak market value of all slaves in the U.S. of $3.2 billion.
Actually, this estimate is almost certainly too high, distorted by the onrushing war and by the types of slaves most likely to be traded. But even if we accept this figure, it means that America spent five times as much on the war that led to the abolition of slavery as the economic value of the slaves to those who held them in bondage. The North alone spent three times as much on the war as the total perceived market value of enslaved Americans.
Goldin’s research raises all sorts of intriguing questions.
Like: Should this gigantic cost, already paid, be factored into today’s calculations about reparations?
And: If not, why not?
And: Was it completely unfeasible for the Union government to buy out the slaveholders, as, for example, the British did in the Caribbean?
And even if they couldn’t, might Lincoln and his government instead have used a simple alternative — namely, offering a bounty, even up to $800, for each slave who either made it to Union lines or was brought there to be emancipated?
This simple expedient would surely have swiftly collapsed the entire Southern economy. For every O’Hara family with a plantation full of slaves, there were dozens of poor white Southerners with few, or no, slaves and every incentive to raid the plantation, overpower the owner, take the slaves, and head for Union lines and a glorious payday.
This would have been way cheaper than actually fighting the war, as well as saving more than half a million lives.
These days, academics are more likely to tell you not to think than they are to provoke you into thinking. Claudia Goldin, a new and richly deserved Nobel laureate, is refreshingly old-school.
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