This book is one of those things, like Economic Institutions of Capitalism, I had to open and read  through as if agnostic. Deep zen bath.

Can you guess why I went searching for it? mmmm. My journey began on the web. Here is the path: Veblen --> Kuznets --> NBER (bah) -->econometrics (bah) -->cleometricians (c. 1970) -->Feinstein.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

For more that a decade

Remember Donnan? Forget Donnan. Until you obtain Time on the Cross, vol. II, Evidence and Methods, wherein is revealed, presumably, all the source data omitted in vol. I, or all source data not even footnoted. That's how neolibmetricians do you, so to reconstruct historical truths from the numbers ...

scores of scholars have been exploring every conceivable source of information bearing on the operation of the slave system. The search led them into the deepest tecesses of the National Archives

...although detailed census data prior to 1970 is all county level, as I've commented elsewhere.

and various state archives where the original, handwritten schedules of information collected by the census takers of 1850 and 1860 were stored....

The bulk appears to originate from LA [!], NC, SC, VA, UT, sadly. The largest slave populations were AL, MS, GA. Also, the book makes no, ZERO, attempt to evaluate international slave trade, not even to balance national accounts or adjust price inflation.

As a result of the search, the cliometricians have amassed a more complete body of information on the operation of the slave system that has been available to anyone interested in the subject either during the antebellum era or since then. It is this enormous body of evidence which is the source of many of their new discoveries.

Some of the discoveries were at one time as unbelievable to the cliometricians as they will be to the readers of this volume. Indeed many of the findings presented in the chapters that follow wer initially discounted, even rejected out of hand. But when persistent efforts to contradict the unexpected discoveries failed, these scholars were forced into a wide-ranging and radical intepretation of American slavery. [Time on the Cross: 7-8]

Radical in the narrow sense of refuting the claims of economic historian and authoritay U.B. ("who?") Philips, 1877 - 1934.

oh, yes.


Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Have you read the book? Did you listen to Engerman's interview? To what consensus do you allude? Is it the one that proves profitability is not an end unto itself? Or the one that disproves any economictric calculus of economic goods? Slavery is a good thing. Emancipation is for suckers.

Inflation is inevitable. Adjust your attitude accordingly.

I've read many a NBER working paper on hardware and software investment... before the subject was even commercialized popular. I can attest to the rigorous methods of NBER cliometric contributors. My pants, man! Economic historiography was impossible before Kuznets.

Will you insist in my faults, though I merely report the findings of the prize winning economists to those who cannot read?

For shame.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

In the absence of evidence on the market behavior of slaveowners, it was easy for historians inclined to the romantic to postulate a dichotomy between paternalism [cf. Sunstein] and profit seeking. They took evidence of paternalism to imply that slaveowners must have sacrificed profits to other objectives. Now that the profitability of slaver and the overwhelming dominance of business considerations in the market behavior of slaveowners are firmly established, should we assume that paternalism was an invetion of apologists for slavery? That conclusion would be as romantic and naïve as the one we have rejected. There is too much evidence of deep personal attachments between owners and their bondsmen [sic] to deny that this was a facet of the slave system. "Now my heart is nearly broke," wrote a Louisiana planter on the occasion of the death of the principal slave manager [!]. "I have lost poor Leven, one of the most faithful black men that ever lived. He was truth and honesty, and without a fault that I ever discovered. He has overseed the plantation nearly three years

Can you not see yourself take up Leven's crucial role in assuring the value added to the STABILITY and GROWTH of a young nation as you weave through 495 rush hour?

and has done much better than any white man had ever done here, and I lived a quiet life."

Would this expression of affection have been quite so deep if Leven had been inefficient, dishonest, and troublesome? While we do not mean to imply that affection for slaves was purely a function of their earning capacity, we do mean to suggest that it was more usual for affection and productivity to reinforce each other than to conflict with each other. Both cruelty and affection had their place on southern plantations. [Time on the Cross: 77-78]