Gordon Tullock on the Economics of Slavery

Gordon Tullock was a phenomenally precise and well-articulated economist. Since his untimely passing I have spent a few idle hours perusing some of his lesser-known works. A review of two books entitles 'The Economics of Slavery' is a true gem and showcases his excellent grasp of history. Tullock offers commentary on the phenomenon known as manumission, which should strike any slave-based society as the slaves themselves are apt to know better how to take care of themselves and how to work productively than are the slaveholders. Thus, slaves should rent themselves and work where their talents are used best, paying some fraction of their wages to the slaveholder and keeping the rest. Eventually, they might be able to buy themselves. Why was this not common practice?

Quoth Tullock (p. 11):

"The basic reason for the failure of this type of “sale” of the slave to himself in the guise of manumission to develop in the ante-bellum South would appear to be the stringent and steadily growing legal restrictions on manumission. There was also considerable social pressure against manumission, and in the last years before the Civil War a reaction to abolitionist propaganda developed into strong arguments that slavery was somehow a superior form of civilization. The explanation for these developments is fairly simple. The individual slaveholder would have been better off if he could have made a deal with his slaves to sell them their freedom, Large numbers of free negroes, however, would have endangered the “property rights” of the slaveholders in those that were still fully or partially owned. Thus the slaveholders had a motive collectively to favor laws against manumission in spite of the fact that each one would have benefitedfrom permission to manumit his own slave if he were the only one given such permission. The long run outcome of this tension between the individual and collective interests of the slave owners cannot now be known. From 1806 when importation of slaves was forbidden to 1860 was only 54 years, or considerably less than the threescore years and ten which the Bible gives as a normal life span. In economic terms this was not long enough to bring the system even near to full equilibrium. If we add on the numerous sociological factors, adjustment would have been even more delayed. Thus the possibility that slavery would have eliminated itself remains an open one."

 As they say, "read the whole thing". In fact, why not read all of his things.

Why the Catholic Church May Have Caused France to Have Too Low a Population Today

Usually when the Catholic Church is mentioned, one thinks of persons encouraging people to have more children and consequently populations to grow. However, in a current working paper, Oxford economist Ferdinand Rauch and his LSE colleague Guy Michaels show that the Catholic Church may have caused there to be fewer Frenchies today than what would otherwise have been the case. From the abstract:

"Do locational fundamentals such as coastlines and rivers determine town locations, or can historical events trap towns in unfavorable locations for centuries? We examine the effects on town locations of the collapse of theWestern Roman Empire, which temporarily ended urbanization in Britain, but not in France. As urbanization recovered, medieval towns were more often found in Roman-era town locations in France than in Britain, and this difference still persists today. The resetting of Britain’s urban network gave it better access to naturally navigable waterways when this was important, while many French towns remained without such access."

One reason why this happened is the decline of the Catholic Church on the British Isles after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 453 AD, while the bishoprics of France remained strong and attracted people who might have otherwise founded new towns.

This is a very interesting working paper and I hope it will be published in a good journal. This is not really my field, but before, I put a great deal of stock in the locational fundamentals hypothesis, but now I tend to think that maybe cities are also partially just random formations from a group of people's at one time happening to live close together.

Still, I am not saying that randomness is a big part, just somewhat greater than I had thought before. To adjudicate between the competing hypotheses, one can look at bomb raids and natural disasters and see whether the affected cities have risen again. This is the approach taken by many economists and as far as I can tell it tends to favour the locational fundamentals hypothesis. But Rauch and Michaels do a great job of achieving variation in the sources of evidence and that is why I update my beliefs and why I - again - hope this paper gets its authors a really good publication.