The Economic Effects Of American Slavery: Tests At The Border

>> John Taylor: We're very happy to have Hoyt Bleakley. I got it right?

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Yes, sir. Thank you.

>> John Taylor: Speak to us about the Economic Effects of American Slavery: Tests at the Border.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Thank you.

>> John Taylor: More interesting title. This is with your colleague, Paul Rhode.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Yes.

>> John Taylor: Okay.

 

 

>> Hoyt Bleakley: You got his name right, too. That's great.

>> John Taylor: Welcome. Anyway, we look forward to your talk.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Appreciate it. Thanks for having me here. It's been a great. My visit here has been great so far, and I don't want to think about it in the past tense, even though the time is waning.

 

Great conversations. This is part of a project that I've been working on. There's several papers. I'll allude to several of them. And part of my time here was to develop a book proposal which we have made some progress on as well. So it's kind of hard to exist in the current world and not see that slavery, as it happened in the United States historically, is part of a lot of conversations.

 

It's often associated with a lot of contemporary disparities and so forth as well. But there's, of course, a deeper history that goes farther back about debate that happened within history and within economic history of its effect in the time it was. It was a thing. One of the things, of course, that's unusual about the modern world is the ending of slavery.

 

Right. And so you get places that in northwest Europe and then the northern parts of the United States where circa 1800, they start abolishing slavery. It might be. Pennsylvania is the first jurisdiction that actually accomplishes this. So that bears in mind an interesting contrast here, which is that we have these two regions that end up being quite different by the time of the Civil War.

 

Antebellum. I'm going to say antebellum a lot. That means before the Civil War. That's the war we're talking about. You got this kind of clear bifurcation into colonies and then states where slavery was prevalent, in places where it was abandoned, abolished, where there was some. Some extent emancipation.

 

And that sets up a comparison that we can think about because it turns out there was a lot of divergence of these regions starting at the time of the Revolution or a little after. The colonies are about equal, balanced in terms of population. Maybe 40% of the free population is in the slave states.

 

By 1860, that had dropped to 30% of the population was in the slave states of the free population and maybe less than 40% of the total population. So the regions were diverging, and that's on rural population just alone if you start thinking about total population, which would include the growth of cities, the contrast is even more stark because the free states really are the beginnings of what we recognize as modern economies in terms of more widespread economic agency, more widespread political agency, urbanization, manufacturing, patenting, et cetera.

 

And so there's this really stark divergence in the regions that goes against a little bit some of these claims that suggest that labor coercion alongside land dispossession are sort of foundational to modern economic growth to say, the rise of the per capita income growth that we see in the United States and in Northwest Europe as well, that starts, you know, sort of in the 1800s.

 

The historians at the time didn't think that right. In fact, they were saying, well, why were these regions diverging? Why was what seemed like a moribund institution continuing to succeed? And the first generation of historians that thought of this, historians kind of the dean of that school was UB Phillips, this guy, these are his books that were the most prominent.

 

And his explanation mirrored often with, in terms of the story being the same, often with the interpretation being the opposite, but said the reason why the slave states continued with slavery is that it was baked into the social system. So it wasn't, it was not really an economic explanation.

 

It was more a social, political, as I said, a systemic explanation. And you know, the critics of slavery would say, well, this was about. That continued because these plantation owners were status seekers, to use a modern term. And so they, they got this non pecuniary benefit from being the lord of the manor in the, in the sort of more modern context.

 

And so, you know, you could kind of retcon interpretations of feudalism and other economic systems that were, that had all these problems being productively efficient. I should say, of course, it goes without saying that now we recognize this labor coercion is immoral. That's in a sense a modern development.

 

And my approach to this is not to think about the morality of it. I'm an economist in some sense. It's not really my comparative advantage. My interest is in thinking about, of course, things that we now recognize as immoral may raise productivity, they may lower it. Those things are, if not orthogonal, at least they aren't, you know, they're imperfectly connected.

 

And so explanations of the regional divergence kind of were set at the time on. Well, you're not really thinking about people as doing this to make money, to sort of maximize resources. They were kind of stuck in this social system where people were Status seeking apologists on this side, the apologists would.

 

Slavery would say, well, it's that as a feudal lord or a lord of the manor had some obligation to the system or to his subjects. That interpretation was out there as well. But they both kind of build in this non pecuniary aspect of the problem. That was 100 years ago.

 

Now, 50 years ago, we get work by Conrad Admire, we get work by Fogel and Engerman that says, okay, if the claim is that it's these non pecuniary aspects that are keeping the system going, that explains it's falling behind as a region, let's go and look for the evidence of non pecuniary stuff.

 

And much of their work, they said a lot of things, some of it perhaps spicier than this. But the basic fundamental aspect of their claim vis a vis what I just said is it looks like plantations were making profits. It looks like they were doing so more or less at what you'd expect if you thought about the opportunity cost of capital.

 

Okay, so if you say, well, this is a business that's doing as well as the next thing you could do with your money, that doesn't leave a lot of room for these non pecuniary explanations by construction because those are the residuals that we would out of our models.

 

And so that created a lot of arguments, a lot of, you know, polemics for decades on kind of that precise point about are we measuring returns correctly, etc. There's sort of a funny aspect of this though, which is that about the same time as Fogel and Angerman, we got Doug north, right?

 

And Doug north, what's he saying? He's saying, well, we really need to think about not just, you know, kind of the emerging neoclassical mathematical economics, but we need to think about the institutional artifice that surrounds decisions and, and so forth. Almost hearkening back to the. What the historian said before, which is you need to think about the society and the social pressures and stuff, but, but you know, Douglas north said it in a more perhaps general way.

 

And so, you know, you might think it's interesting that north was saying this, but which is again very much a systemic argument. Argument, whereas Fogel and Angerman were basically making a micro level argument. Let's look at what happens with farms and farm data and returns on capital. What do I do?

 

Do I put my money in a, in a sugar plantation or in a railroad bond? Now, if you step back and think of this either from a Doug north perspective or a modern perspective on like say, growth accounting across countries. Because you could go to a country that might have plenty of firms that are making profits but have abysmal outcomes because the institutional environment is dreadful, you have low productivity, right?

 

So, we maybe put that in the term, doesn't have to go there. There could be misallocation or something. But the, in some sense it's, it's funny that these systemic things kind of get set aside under these intense interest in the profitability of plantations. There's another thread which is the historians, which first were very averse to the economist take on this question.

 

And I think a more recent generation of historians had become accustomed to it. But I worry that they heard the word profitability and they kind of did a word association and said, doesn't that mean capitalism? And so you get a lot of, a lot of stuff that is kind of creating these links that may or may seem sometimes close, and may sometimes seem quite distant, but would say here are these things that are related to slavery and then are related to profitability of slavery and then kind of transform into modern economic investments.

 

So, and that has gone kind of far. It's gone to, you know, there's a plaque on the wall at the Smithsonian that's at the start of the exhibition that says the kind of really ridiculous claim that 50% of, of antebellum outcome of output of the country was, was coming from the labor of the slave sector, the sector where there was in slave labor, and this sort of no path that gets you there.

 

But there are historians that have written books that make that claim. So it gets on the plaque. So again, I'm coming back to this. Yes, sir.

>> John Cochrane: On the stylized history, which I want to check whether my vague recollection is right, part of it has to do with the technology.

 

So it may be capitalism, but the north did not have slaves in their factories.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Right.

>> John Cochrane: So that's a mode of production that is not amenable to slavery. And the sort of, this stylized history I vaguely remember is that it was kind of on its way out in the 1790s because the sorts of things that Jefferson could do on his farm were not that amenable to slavery.

 

It's Kind of turning into sort of a feudal system at the time. And then you invent the cotton gin, then you invent ocean transport and suddenly you have a new technology that is much more amenable to large scale thing as sugar plantations. Sugar plantations will likewise amenable to large scale forced labor in a way that, you know, the skill that you need, for example, in a factory isn't.

 

And that, that brought, that accounted for slavery starting to die out and then blossoming again in the 1830s. So how far off is my stylized economic history here?

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Well, Chris, the, the country was already 200 years old and you know, Jamestown was well before your, you jump into that story, right?

 

So, the foundational aspects of settlement of the East Coast are that there's land abundance and labor scarcity extreme. And so, slavery, it's easy to see that that's playing a role like indentured servitude in jump-starting the settlement of the country quite early.

>> John Cochrane: Right.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: So I would say,

 

 

>> John Cochrane: Qualitatively different kind of slavery.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: We can't weigh in on that because that's just too controversial to put on the Internet, but the point is that there are, there are cycles here, right. Intensely being related to development, say in, on frontiers. Right. So it might be easier, for example to settle the frontier if you can coerce your workers to go out there with you.

 

 

>> John Cochrane: Their frontier didn't have a lot of slaves, did it?

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Southern frontier did.

>> John Cochrane: I mean, you know, yeah, it was easier to run away on the frontier.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Well, so let's say frontier T. Frontier T plus one would be frontiersman. Okay, but let's not get bogged down here.

 

All I'm saying is, I'm not disagreeing with it. There are cycles here. I'm just saying that if you focus on just the, just the 18, the 19th century, you're going to see one of those cycles and there are others.

>> John Cochrane: But when it's because there are particular technologies that do well with sort of large forced labor, and other technologies that don't.

 

And why the south and north?

>> Hoyt Bleakley: You know, you know, so if you tell me, you know, human capital and those kinds of things don't work well, I can point you examples in the gulag that were about people in the, you know, in the USSR where people are sent to these gulags that would do research into making bombers and bombs and stuff.

 

 

>> John Cochrane: Right, is this true?

>> Hoyt Bleakley: And so it's not a full story. And in the, in the, by the 1840s, there were lots of people working on using, trying to get slave labor in Factories and arguing that it wasn't impossible.

>> John Cochrane: We have to educate them first, then grab them and turn them into slaves, right?

 

 

>> Hoyt Bleakley: The amount of education required for some of this factory work was pretty low. I'll make one observation, which is, and I'm going to come back to an institutional story with this quote from a governor of South Carolina who says, we, we, we, we're happy to have a little bit of manufacturing here as long as it's not so powerful that it can compete with our interests.

 

Right. And so that's a, that's a different story, that's an incompatibility with slavery as practice in plantations and manufacturing development. But not the one you're stating.

>> John Cochrane: I like your social, you need to live in a society where everybody has slaves, otherwise it's not going to work.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: There is probably some of that, but it also excludes other things, and that's sort of part of our message.

 

And so again, this is this little table I made, which is, if you think about this three decades of work after the profitability results, the idea is they're basically comparing areas that they're comparing returns to factors that are mobile, local public finance, local public. Economics says you want to compare the factors that are immobile, right?

 

And so we kind of are making that pivot. We're saying let's think about not capital, but let's think about land as the factor that can't move here. The other difficulty with that literature is that they collected all this great data on the cotton plantations because their instinct, like John's is like, well, that's kind of the, at the moment, by 1850s, that's kind of the core.

 

That's what's driving a lot of demand for slave labor. And then, they compared that to data they collected from upstate New York and Ohio and Michigan and so forth. And, you know, there's 5, 800 miles between them. And so our part of our thing is we're going to think about areas that are close.

 

There are kind of two ways to think about close here. The one I'll talk about today is they're right next to each other. Right, you could do close in another sense, which is we find areas that look like each other in terms of soil type and weather. You do that, you get kind of the same result.

 

But the one I'll talk about is this one here. Right. By 1860, this is the free slave border. West Virginia is not a state yet, but we put that in for reference to avoid confusion. And these are the states that we're going to think about. These are formed pretty early by decisions that are made.

 

So, for example, the Northwest ordinances open the territory that becomes Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, parts of Michigan, Wisconsin. And you know that that happens with, not without any slavery, in part because Jefferson, before he goes off to Paris, he writes in this memo, he says, let's start with the default that the territory shouldn't have slavery.

 

And so that memo gets recycled into the Northwest ordinance. It's just that it cuts off the bottom part. So the initial memo had all past the Appalachian being having slavery be prohibited, but it at least kind of manages to stick that line in the memo manages to stick for the territory north of the Ohio.

 

The Missouri Compromise later forms the boundary there between free and slave states where Iowa and Missouri are, as I said, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Ohio, abolish slavery relatively early. New Jersey does it in a very transitional way. But what I'm going to argue is that what matters is not is there an enslaved person in the state so much as is your state capital being dominated by planters.

 

And in New Jersey it wasn't, even though there were a half dozen slaves that were freed by the 13th Amendment. Richmond, for example, was. Well, even Annapolis were capitals that were dominated by slave owning interests. That's going to be our comparisons. I said it's set relatively early. So their attempts because West Virginia and Virginia started as one state, there's a lot of conflict because slavery doesn't really take hold in the mountains, really.

 

Its core is down by the Chesapeake Bay, but the state government is run by the planters down by the Chesapeake Bay. And so a lot of West Virginians are saying we need to either change the system or leave. And it's hard to do that because for a long time the apportionment rules are set according to 1790.

 

By the time you get to 1850, the populate is shifting, but they don't have the representation. It takes an event like the war to allow them to separate.

>> John Cochrane: What was the West Virginian's objection to you guys having slaves over there?

>> Hoyt Bleakley: I would say, yeah, that's a good question.

 

So of course it's back to the sort of Douglas north thing that you want to be ruled by people that have your interests in mind. And so the free people, were they.

>> John Cochrane: Taxing them or putting in import tariffs or what were they doing to annoy the free people other than just having slaves?

 

 

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Well, the one thing would be they don't provide infrastructure for it.

>> John Cochrane: Okay.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: That's a, that's a thing. If you're up in the mountains, you need, you need access for infrastructure. Another thing would be if you look at where public schools emerge, they emerge in places where there's.

 

That's free soil.

>> Valerie Ramey: Was this part of the free soil movement that led to these political.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Well, the free soil public schools emerged earlier. But the free soil movement is sort of the precursor to the Republican Party or one of the precursors. And its argument is free labor territory should be free labor there should be free soil in the sense that generous homesteading for small farmers.

 

Those were the kind of relevant parts here. There's also a free speech aspect. Let's not get into that. It's too distraction getting to the main points there.

>> John Cochrane: But on specifications in West Virginia that happened during the Civil War, they didn't want to fight other peoples property. So they had a very good reason at that time.

 

And many of the non slaveholders had real trouble rationalizing why they should fight.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Yeah, that's right. And before then of course, if you lived in a place where there was slavery, even if you were not a free person, not a slave owner, you would still have to be compelled, you would be compelled to serve in jury duties like jury duty.

 

You'd be serving, excuse me, the slave patrol. Think of that as you get sort of six months of all nighters over the course of your adulthood. You'd also be at risk for if there's an insurrection because I mean the lesson of Haiti and of Nat Turner was that when there was a slave revolt they didn't check to see whether you were had slaves or not.

 

Right. So, so in a sense those were aspects in which you were exposed to the violence of the system in various ways that would spill over to you whether you were directly involved or not. You know, there's a, there's a historian that talks about, you want to make a distinction between societies that have slaves versus slave societies as a kind of word, as a, you know, phrase in the sense that just the rules of the game end up being very different.

 

I'll have some more on this later. Okay, so now there's, there's sort of the systemic perspective. Right. That follows Douglas north and Gavin is, is, you know, has done work, this characterizes a lot of Gaben's work when he's not robbing a bank and for example. Right, sorry, we'll get that story later.

 

But so, so which is to think about it, you really want to think about a systemic perspective here. You want to think about how all these things are interrelated and you don't want to do micro level analysis. If you're stuck with the micro level analysis, you know, your naive economist perspective might be on the Ohio side of the Ohio River.

 

I can do end things with my land on the Kentucky side. I can do N plus 1 things with my land. So I've relaxed a constrained. Of course my, of course my land value is going to be higher. My sort of scope of what I can do with it means I'll Bring in more resources and I'll get more value out of it.

 

But that +1, it turns out, is a pretty toxic institution. An institution in the north sense, which is, I don't mean like a single entity, but that affects the organization of society. And so if we think about this comparison at the river. Yeah, go ahead.

>> John Cochrane: Plus one.

 

So suppose you wanted to run a plantation, but you say, I'm going to pay my. I'm going to hire Irish and pay them wages.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Yeah.

>> John Cochrane: You would not get away with it, right?

>> Hoyt Bleakley: I think you could get away with it. It's just that a free person would eventually realize they had a better option elsewhere.

 

And so you're making me tease my result, which is that one of the things we find, in addition to all the developmental differences, regional differences existing at the border in essentially the same magnitude, we also look at wages and we find that you have to pay higher wages to get somebody to work on the side where slavery is present.

 

And so those Irish peasants you're describing might just leave or might find other ways to exit that arrangement. And part of that is because again, there's these systemic effects, which is that someone who's coming from Europe, maybe in a system that looks is still feudal or recently feudal or manorial, they come here and they come to the United States and they see, well, there's this opportunity for me to go to where the society is run for people like me, and that's Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania in the 1700s is called the best poor man's country.

 

Talk about sort of why that's the case. But again, sort of institutional and geographic factors contribute.

>> John Cochrane: You certainly couldn't hire free blacks to run a plantation.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Again, I, I don't, I don't. I think they wouldn't want to. I think you also, you're.

>> John Cochrane: So did Fogel.

 

So Fogel says they're profitable. But does that include the fact part of the profitable is because you don't have to pay wages, or is it profitable even if you did have to pay wages?

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Well, if you think about enslavement, it's sort of like a prepayment plan for wages.

 

Right. You had to do these things to compare what is a stock versus a flow. And you paid a laborer. And they worked that out with different interest rates and argued that it's sort of a wash. What it wouldn't include. Some others have argued this is back to like, the systemic explanation is that it wouldn't include the implicit subsidy you get from there being a slave patrol and a militia.

 

 

>> John Cochrane: Well, except you pay taxes for those you do.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: But the people who are conscripted to be in the militia don't, are not are being forced to pay with their time.

>> John Cochrane: And so there's a fundamental inefficiency that wages are much better incentive than trying to beat it out of people to make them.

 

 

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Adam Smith guy, he made that observation precisely on this topic. Right. That you can't that that the biggest problem with slavery, in his view. View was the agency issue. Turns out in our context, that's not going to come out, right? So there maybe are some TFP differences, but it's mostly that you need.

 

If you need to pay free workers to show up, you need to pay them more. That's going to give an advantage to the other place. It's going to grow faster, it's going to attract people faster. And if, if a wage premium is built into where you are because of a feature of the society, just like any other location, specific cost, it gets built into land prices, right?

 

Because it's like I'm in a piece of land that has a disadvantage in hiring people, almost as if I were sitting next to some other disamenity, right? So I wouldn't want to put a business next to something that's polluting or something of that sort, okay? So, a number of people made this observation that we're coming to, starting with de Tocqueville and Beaumont.

 

De Tocqueville, of course, is famous for writing Democracy in America based on his trip. They had actually, they had this junket to write about prisons in the United States and, you know, talk about mission creep, right? So they end up writing all this other stuff. And one of the things they do, they get to New York City and kind of travel around the north.

 

And they're just asking a lot of questions. And one of the questions they ask is people are telling us about these regional differences, that the slave states just are so different in their developmental outcomes than the free states. And what is that? Is that about the climate? Is that about.

 

Because there's slavery? And, you know, they kind of say, well, we don't. We can't really tell because you got them both confounded. And they say that until they get to a trip down the Ohio River. These are illustrations from Beaumont's. De Beaumont's Journal, where he says, if you look on one side of the river, it's.

 

This would be the, I guess the left bank coming down from Pittsburgh. You see Virginia, you see Kentucky, and you see trees, and you look on the right bank and you see activity. That's Ohio. And so they say, well, gosh, it's sort of hard to see how this is a function of the geography because they have the same weather, they have the same kind of everything, right?

 

They have market access. That's fantastic. I mean, the Ohio river is kind of the best piece of natural infrastructure ever. And they have, you know, the same country, the same, ostensibly the same constitution and laws, except for this institution that differs across the River, Northern Italian, Korea. Very much so.

 

Yeah, that's right. Except in this case, free labor can move at its will. Right. If you try to cross the North Korean border going south, you, it doesn't end up well, right? And so here we can think about labor, free labor, as kind of the fact that it can arbitrage differences lets us make this inference about amenities from wages.

 

They talk to a lot of people, they observe that. This person they talked to in Cincinnati says, yeah, well, Cincinnati, Ohio opens later than Kentucky for settlement, but it really takes off, right? And de Tocqueville in his diary says it's really hard to attribute these differences to some cause other than slavery.

 

That's a picture of his, that it brutalizes the black population and it debilitates the white, okay? It goes on to say man's not made for servitude. But for our endorsed, but for our purposes, the difference is that the free population is also heavily affected. Okay, so we're going to look at these.

 

Now there's a funny thing here in our result which is that of course the reason to coerce labor would be that it must be cheaper to do that than to pay to pay for it. Right. Like it's like don't steal things if you can get it cheaper at the store effectively.

 

And so you think if you're, if there's a place where you can coerce labor, it should be an advantage, just like my N versus N plus one argument. Well, that may not be right, if it's distorting other things, if it's sort of messing up the institution. So, I'll skip, I'll go through this really quickly, but you know, we have outcomes from the census to look at.

 

We're going to focus on 1860 because that's when the data are best. You know, we'll be looking at counties that are on the border, we'll be looking at buffers around the border. You know, we get, we get Martha's Vineyard there in the 300 mile buffer, which maybe isn't the best comparison.

 

So we perhaps want to focus on, we want to kind of see how this varies as we look at closer and farther away. And you know, our main results are population because this is, we're settling these places, right. This is being settled for development and then land outcomes like improvement value.

 

So here's an example of this. So this is, this is like the percentile where you are in the percentile of the distribution of non white population in the top and then rural population, both are density concepts. So that we're netting out whether the land area is larger or smaller.

 

And so the, you know, think of this as like, well, this is kind of doing what you'd expect if slavery is permitted in Missouri, but not in Ohio and not, excuse me, in Illinois. You know, it's not permitted in Pennsylvania, but it's permitted in Maryland. And you get, it's not a perfect mirror, but you get some of this, you get some of these places where you can see the borders in the other direction.

 

Right. So this is population density, you know, like there's the bit of the Mason Dixon line. You would see it out here. It's just that the bubbles are kind of obscuring it because they're so big. You can kind of see these differences between Illinois and Missouri. So rural, so that's rural population.

 

That's, that's black and white. This isn't a story of. These are the coefficients that you would get if you did these very different, these various comparisons from the samples I said before. So there's, there's, there's more non whites. There are fewer whites, turns out the total population is less.

 

That's not what you'd get if it were just a question of I'm substituting one worker of one type for a worker of another type, right? In fact, it's about 6 more of 1 and 40 fewer of the other. Okay, so there's something that's depressing what's going on with free people.

 

That's more than enough to compensate for or the sort of overwhelm, as it were, what you're able to do as a, as a landowner, given that you can, that you can hire in slave labor as well, okay? On the farm side you get. By the way, the magnitudes aren't trivial here.

 

Right, I mean, so this number logs. Wait, we'll go back one more in logs. This is like 0.5 under these different specifications. So we're not, this isn't like, you know, the 10%, 50% fewer people on one side of the border. And so that's going to be,

>> Speaker 5: So regression just or.

 

And it just has one variable in it or?

>> Hoyt Bleakley: That is the one variable we also have spatial controls, you know, that allow for the functional longitude or distance from the border. We have other specifications where we control for. Was there a glacier there? What's the soil type, that sort of thing.

 

But that's, this is the one, this is the border effect purged of this various stuff. Yeah, John.

>> John Cochrane: It's also consistent, though, with the simplistic slavery is something that uses not many people in an abundant amount of land. Whereas, you know, the white settlers going to Ohio are growing wheat, and that takes more people.

 

 

>> Hoyt Bleakley: I mean, it's consistent with that, but it's sort of. There's a bit of circularity there in the sense that why would you choose to use your land in a way that a landowner would like to have lots of factors of production brought to it? Right, it'd like to have more capital, more land.

 

And I say if I come to the landowner and say I have this technology that means you can't recruit factors to work on your land, they're going to say that's not a good deal for me, right? This, it turns out, is somewhat stable. I mean, the coefficients get pretty noisy.

 

I don't have standard error bars here, but if you did, they'd be larger and larger back in time. But you can see that the point estimates are pretty stable. Going far back, especially if we focus just on the Mason Dixon line, which was, you know, continuously settled throughout this, this period.

 

So it doesn't look like we're looking at something transitory here. That's a function say of what, what could it be the cotton boom? Could be the soil exhaustion, could be, you know, the War of 1812, or it could be tariffs. You know, so all those things happen, but they, they don't seem to be driving these coefficients different.

 

 

>> Speaker 6: Just thinking about the population density result for whites in particular. So are you primarily gonna think about slavery as affecting productivity and production? Are you also interested in amenities? So I'm thinking about the militia argument you made earlier. It could be that the slavery also less nice society to live in because you've got all these extractive coercive institutions.

 

So that would show up in the populations but wouldn't necessarily show up in farm productivity.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: So we'll do those tests. You can, you can, let's say you can attempt or construct TFP at the county level has measurement problems like TFP measurement problem has when you deal with aggregates.

 

And the answer to your question is that the TFP differences don't figure prominently in understanding differences at the border. Maybe a handful of percent differences. Sometimes it's more, sometimes it's less. On the other hand, a wage difference is gonna figure, it seems to explain a lot of this.

 

Now, why does a wage difference. I don't know if I said this before, but we're going to find a wage difference of 10%. Maybe that doesn't sound like a lot when we're talking about 50% lower land value, but it turns out you need to think about the ratio of the factor shares.

 

Okay, so if labor is two thirds or half of the land share, the output share, and I increase it by 10% and I have to put that 10% somewhere. I can't put it on capital because it's mobile. It has to go to land. And land has like a 5% or 10% maximum output share.

 

And so that 10% increase in wages that ends up being about 5% of total cost sort of nukes the land value, right? Because that's the only thing that can absorb it because it's the inelastic factor. I'll show you the math again, if that wasn't clear. But the amenity explains almost all of this.

 

The other part that is left is land improvement because if you have more people, you have more houses, you have more fences, you have more barns.

>> John Cochrane: These are largely farmers moving in Ohio. Right. Sounds like you're telling sort of an agglomeration story. If you're a white farmer moving from New Hampshire, you want to go to Ohio where there's a town and lots of other white farmers.

 

You don't want to go to a place where everybody around you. And I can think of 100 very sensible reasons, sort of standard agglomeration, even farming is something where, hey, Bob, you know, how do I cut down the wheat? Dove back there in the back 40. I got the new machine here or something.

 

 

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Right. I don't disagree with the society they were moving into was part of it. I don't know that we'd entirely ascribe it to density, but it's possible. Of course, somebody who lives on the Ohio river or in the Mason Dixon line could walk across the county line and get some of that information as well.

 

But, you know, some of the agglomeration, or call it agglomeration, call it aspects of the society, like there's a schooling system. There are aspects of the society that stand up very different. Let me postpone. I'll show it to you. When I get to the point about county fairs, we'll come back to you.

 

 

>> Speaker 5: Land was more expensive than the slave.

>> John Cochrane: I'm sorry.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Wages are higher, Land is cheaper.

>> Speaker 5: Okay.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Okay. So then let's walk through that. Think about, you're headed down the Ohio river on a steamboat, and do I settle on the Kentucky side? Do I settle on the Ohio side?

 

Right, and you find out that land is cheaper on the side where there's slavery, but wages are higher. So the prices are saying go south, but the vast majority of people, again two to one ratio in some cases, are going north. And so, that's kind of like a reveal preference test, right?

 

Which is there must be something about the decision to go south that's very disagreeable to these people. Well, vary isn't the right word because maybe the marginal person values it at about 10%, but it's enough to direct a lot of the population north. That's kind of the standard.

 

We control for stuff. We control for stuff, we test for things. There are a few things that these are like the P values from all the possible environmental variables. So sometimes the P values are nicely distributed uniformly, as they should be, sometimes they're not. One is temperature. Oddly, that seems to be a function of that.

 

The temperature stations are more densely settled in the north. And so we measure them better. One big honking difference that people always want to See is the glacier. Of course, the glacier affected the soil type and affected kind of the flatness of the area. In some cases made better farming area, in some places made worse than others.

 

But anyway, as you can see, the glacier wasn't the glacier. The terminal moraine is not the same as the line that we're looking at, but it's close enough that we have to control for it. So that's more placebo. I want to comment on soil exhaustion. So one thing that was common is that the planters were accused of being very bad stewards, not just of people they were enslaving, but also the soil.

 

And we actually don't see any evidence of that at the border by a couple tests. One is that we get these effects across places that have very different timings of settlement. Right, and so if this is about soil exhaustion, you'd expect what's happening is the places that are pretty far out are gonna have really higher.

 

Will have higher land values because they're exploiting the land more rapidly. And the places that are back east are gonna have lower land values because the soil is washed away. That doesn't seem to be explaining it there. And we can also use measures of soil exhaustion, like how much of the soil has washed away or how suitable to erosion.

 

That doesn't. That doesn't affect our results. Now we're zoomed into the border. You could also zoom out to the border, as I mentioned. One way to do that is just to kind of graph things, right? So here is. Here are farm values at the county level. And you can kind of see when these things meet at zero, it's like part of the distribution is shifted up.

 

It's like they don't. The distributions are kind of like, right? You can also say, let's look at what the spatial trends are in farm values as you go from either direction. Even doesn't like this graph. I'm sorry, but here it is. The spatial trend says farms are more valuable as you go south in the north.

 

And people write about this, they're like, it's too cold in Minnesota. Right, but in the south, the spatial trends are positive. Are basically saying you want to go north with a kind of peak maybe in the Kentucky, Tennessee border, that. That area. Right. If you follow the spatial trend, they say, well, it looks like you could keep going south from Ohio, from Indiana and continue to get higher farm values.

 

Maybe you don't trust that extrapolation out at Key west, out at El Paso, but I think it's reasonable to think It's a good extrapolation, getting, you know, 100 miles, 200 miles south of the border. You could also look at the environmental characteristics, and you say, what does this look like?

 

So another way to do this test is you say, let's look at places that in. Let's say, can we find a county in North Carolina that has environmental attributes that look like Pennsylvania? And you can find many such places. And if you do that, you also see that it looks like.

 

Based on the environmental attributes, if I would continue south from Pennsylvania, I would get pretty improving outcomes for a while. You get a picture that sort of looks like that top red curve with the extrapolation. So again, the spatial trends seem to say you could do more than just look at the border here.

 

 

>> John Cochrane: Some of this is how close you are to the Ohio river, right up on the Ohio River.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Yeah, that's right. So, we control. Not exactly. We'll run these. Are you on a rectilinear boundary or are you on a river boundary? And the results are pretty similar, okay?

 

So, yeah, either case, your market access is pretty similar because you're right next to each other. But it's, I can see that peeking at the river because that's where you can put your stuff on a boat. You do see some of that. That's very true.

>> Speaker 6: Just as a clarification, just in terms of institutional context, were there any restrictions on mobility across the boundary between states that are slave versus non slave?

 

So presumably escaped slaves was a concern at the border. Did northern states try to police that border? Was there anything to restrict population mobility, or was it effectively just some free mobility?

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Well, the enslaved couldn't move easily. If you're a planter and that's your life choice, then you can't move very easily.

 

Free people could move all they wanted.

>> Speaker 6: I was wondering if,

>> Hoyt Bleakley: The question is, are you. One sec, the question is that the extent there was a restrictional mobility, it was that maybe you. You didn't want to go into a social system that you didn't understand. So we read anecdotes about the Englishman that comes to work at the coal mine in Virginia.

 

And you know how these Englishmen are, right? So he shows up and he starts talking to the slaves that are working at the coal mine. And like, the free workers come and say, don't do that. Get the hell out of here. Right. So there'd be kind of these social barriers that would.

 

That would. You could call that a barrier to mobility in this direction.

>> Speaker 6: What I was wondering is that slave owners obviously don't want their slaves to escape, and so you might imagine they fortify the border to try to catch people escaping.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Well, there were play patrols for sure, but that wouldn't restrict a free.

 

A white person wouldn't be restricted. Right, a free person of color would definitely perceive the difference in the social system. And you do see that they're much more likely to locate just north of the border. But a white person wouldn't have anything other than I'VE already mentioned about the social system, but they could move all they wanted.

 

 

>> Valerie Ramey: I mean, his point was, if you were an owner, you might want to be farther from the border because it's harder for your slaves to escape because they have.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Yeah, that's fine. That's why we do. There's also like a donut design that I didn't mention. Right Where I say let's.

 

Instead of doing the border counties, let's do the off. Just off the border, do the buffers. Yeah, you're right. That certainly is an issue, but that doesn't seem to feed generating our results. So this is a little hard to read. But the point is about extrapolation, really. The area of the country that where the action is, I mean, this isn't like an irrelevant aspect of the region.

 

Your image of the plantations might be cotton, rice, sugar, but most of the economy is still in the border states of the state, slavery. So the median white person is that first dot, which is maybe 120 miles from the border. The median farm value, so that's like weighted by.

 

Weighted by real estate value, essentially is within 150 miles. The median slave, of course, is a lot farther south, but it's still less than 300 miles from the border. So we're looking at an area that at some level, we're looking at an area that's under contestation as well, because this is what they're fighting over.

 

Is this Missouri going to be a territory with slaves or not? Is Kansas going to be a territory? So these are places that are very much under contention. So, there's a puzzle, I think, which is why are people. How would this persist? Why would you get these differences?

 

And I already said how to resolve the puzzle, which is with wages. So we look at wages from the Census of Social Statistics, which oddly was not sent to the National Archives. It was sent to all the states. And so we had to kind of go collect them.

 

So we have wages on a variety of categories. This would include enslaved workers that are being rented or maybe an enslaved worker that had been given their time and was working as if they were a free person. So there may be some issues of comparability. We're going to deal with that by thinking about the categories and showing there's fairly similar results across categories.

 

So, you know, carpenters, domestic servants, day laborers are all. All showing that the wages are higher just south of the border. And the principal component analysis gives a number that's about 10. We can strip out the cost of board, and we see that the cost of living is not driving this, okay?

 

So wages seem to be higher. I should say, there's another paper, we did the test where we say let's look at family farms on either side of the border and let's see how they're doing because we got the revenue and they got their costs. Turns out the yeoman farmers on either side of the border aren't getting the same from the farms.

 

The yeoman farmers on the southern side are getting approximately a 10% higher return to their labor. So that's the same result, same number, but not coming from the labor market, it's coming from this decision of location of farmers. So, I kind of discussed this before, but if you think about the Rosen Robach model, we're looking at a situation where the amenity, where we have a, a low land value and a high wage and that suggests that the amenity is lower.

 

That's the border south. Hello, Ross.

>> Speaker 7: Question. When you look doing a comparison of wages as a real wages, as land prices go up, housing prices go up, higher prices go up.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: So, the way we've constructed Rosen Roebuck here is to put the cost on the land cost on the production side, which is non standard because I understand with cities, it's, with the, it's on the, you know, it's like firms don't have land, but households do.

 

The reason why we do that is that housing is, this is, these are all rural areas. And so the amount of land that goes into a house is minuscule relative to the land cost, okay? So you know, I know we talk about in cities, maybe the land is half of the value of, of the, of the house.

 

Maybe in some places in Palo Alto, it's 110% of the value of the house. Tear it down right here, think of this as being, you know, less than half a percent of the value of the house. That it's all structure and the structure in fact is all labor, right?

 

Because you built it.

>> Speaker 7: Maybe this is a sort of a, I'm being dense here, but why can't, why can't we have sort of labor productivity, higher capital product? I mean, I guess I, I don't see how the, the amenity label squares. Rule out other possibilities. Maybe it's like John's agglomeration issues or maybe, I mean, I, I haven't worked this out in my head, but it, it seems like you could have labor if slaves were complements to free people.

 

 

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Yeah.

>> Speaker 7: Then, you know, sure, you get higher wages, but maybe, maybe overall productivity is lower or something.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Or something. So I think if it's on the productivity side, then you wouldn't get the situation where the wages, because the wages would. In John's case, if it's agglomeration working through consumption.

 

 

>> Speaker 7: Yes.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: We didn't specify this, but it could be. Agglomeration works through consumption, it could work through production.

>> Speaker 7: Yes.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: If it works through production, then the wages. There's really no reason for the wages to be different, right? If it works through consumption, in some sense that's consistent, I'm happy to call that an amenity, right?

 

That you're, in fact, when we go through what people write about this era, they do say things like, the slave states are not a good place for the Englishman to migrate to. You want to move to a place. Place free soil because there's more people who are kindred of spirit and life station or something like that.

 

Right. Now my reading of that is these places are building what we'd call a middle class society that is run for the purpose of a fairly large set of the population, much larger than they would have been used to back in the home country. And that has an amenity value to it.

 

Right. And so that's going to show up as consumption. That's going to mean I need to be paid to be away from that.

>> Speaker 7: I see. So like when. When you say amenity, that could also be unobserved differences and laws that make it better to be a worker-

 

 

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Absolutely, yeah.

>> Speaker 7: South or something which is.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: No, better to be a worker-

>> Speaker 7: Sorry, worse to be a worker-

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Worse to be a worker.

>> Speaker 7: Cuz you're gonna get paid more to compensate crappy laws.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: But it has to be on the consumption side.

 

That's all right. So it's better to be a worker in the sense of like union work rules would be on the productivity side. Maybe.

>> Speaker 7: Okay, thank you, that's very helpful.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: I may have missed your hand for a long time because you're behind, so I wanna get to you.

 

 

>> Valerie Ramey: I'm curious about, I remember there was this paper showing political support, shifts of political support in the south for slavery, again, as the slaves moved once the border were closed, like when there were no more-

>> Hoyt Bleakley: It's like international trade. Okay, so is there any data on that?

 

Because what this would tell you is that the landowners on that side would actually increase the political support against them. I remember seeing this paper. I can actually find out, I don't know if it was a product, but I'll look it up. But that would be an interesting way to-

 

 

>> Hoyt Bleakley: I'm tempted to talk 20 minutes about like the whole political economy of the antebellum period, and I don't think we have time for that. I'm attentive to your point and I think there are certainly changes over that time. But I don't quite know how to answer your question.

 

Tangentially to the issue of the slave trade, there's something that is either very far sighted or too clever by half built into this, right? Which is that if the international ban on importation of slaves had not happened, it may be that it was would have been possible for landowners to recruit enough slaves to undo these population differences at the border.

 

But that since the marginal person coming in after 1809 was free person, it couldn't do it, right? So far sighted, maybe? Clever by half in the sense that it also meant that because the territory where you could have slaves was expanding, it meant that the value was going up, which built in this constituency, right?

 

One of the reasons, like John's observation that it looked like slavery was going away is because it looked like the sort of marginal value of labor was dropping in that sector. And so, it didn't matter, right? The ownership thing wasn't that important that maybe the owners would let go of the bonds.

 

But when the demand goes up, they have an economic interest that goes against sort of this moral suasion. Yep, John.

>> John Cochrane: We have a question from Vincent Geloso whose microphone isn't working.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Okay.

>> John Cochrane: So I'm gonna do my best with this. A point I've been thinking about relates to your discussion of the spatial distribution of population.

 

Wouldn't that pattern generate price level divergence across regions? Higher population densities in non slave states would drive up land prices and by extension the cost of living, particularly for goods of high land input intensity. So then the ratio of wealth schedule in 1980 Census free versus slave would be greater than the ratio of real wages.

 

Nominal wealth per capita free versus slave should be greater than real wealth per capita free versus slave. So he wonders why A you didn't use wealth, B, if you can use wealth schedule of census, you have any kind of regional purchasing power adjustment or proxy to account for what I mentioned.

 

 

>> Hoyt Bleakley: There's a lot there. I'd really appreciate if you would screenshot that for me to get.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Okay.

>> John Cochrane: Thank you, Vincent.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: We do look at wealth. It works out kind of like you'd expect. There's a greater concentration of wealth even if you just look at land well.

 

Not to say nothing about prices yet, but the reason why is that farms are bigger. Farms are bigger because the constraint on farm size when you're on the frontier and it's a family farm is that your family can only get so big so quick. Whereas if you want to get a plantation, you know, you want to have a larger farm, it becomes large enough with say hired labor or enslaved labor, you can get big pretty pretty quickly.

 

Now, because there's this frontier that looks pretty good to a lot of people, the hired labor market's pretty bad. Because why work for somebody when you can go out to the frontier and do a little bit of work, not a little bit, do a lot of work, but get all these capital gains as the frontier catches up to you?

 

That's one reason why Pennsylvania was called the best poor man's country. Because you could be penniless, go out there, start chopping down trees. So you're converting labor into capital, right? Cuz now the farm is more valuable because it's cleared and you can farm on it. And as either the extent of commercial agriculture or the extent of the transport infrastructure catches up to you, you've become a landowner of something, owner of significant wealth.

 

I don't think I can riff on the price differences except to say we, we don't see differences in cost of living. Now if it's super dependent on things like John was saying that it's like there are groups of people in the town who are of kindred positions in life, then that's not priced.

 

But it is an amenity, I think.

>> John Cochrane: So things that you buy on the market are going to be things that you transport. So I would not expect that there. Would be big differences in prices on the Ohio River.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Yeah, yeah, sorry, Vincent. I'll read the thing more carefully afterwards.

 

 

>> Speaker 6: Puzzled by this overall research program here. Seems like you, you have a bunch of things that could be, could be equated or maybe they aren't equated. And you have, you have certain amount of data and certain assumptions you're willing to make. And then you can then pose certain questions based on variants of those.

 

But there doesn't seem to be much organization.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Okay, I don't claim to be an organized person, so.

>> Speaker 6: I think that's a big picture summary.

>> Valerie Ramey: Or like a model with just a few, just a stylized model with a few equations because I'm having.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: So we have a Rosen Robach type model in the appendix that does do this, that allows for productivity and amenity.

 

Shifter does it Just as you'd expect, except just as one would normally do, except you put the amenity, there's an amenity on the labor side, so that's normal. But then the cost associated with land is in the production side because it's a farming economy.

>> Valerie Ramey: What's the hypothesis that you're trying to test?

 

I mean, I got a little lost in some of the details.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: So hypothesis one is. Does the patterns at the border match the regional differences in development? Okay, so we got these double factors of 2 difference in population density and population that's mirrored at the border, okay?

 

So we're discarding kind of the dilemma that de Tocqueville put out there, which is maybe it's climate and geology or something, or maybe it's institutions. There's like we did this and we took this. Now, we're to, okay, what is it that's driving it? If we argue that it's not the natural aspects that create these differences, is it that what is the institution doing?

 

Is it changing factors of production, how they're allocated directly? Or is it changing some technological thing about TFP or production function or something? And so then the next argument we make is, well, it seems like it's loading onto the labor disamenity. Let's just say we're accounting for most of the thing based on the worker free workers apparently would prefer to be elsewhere.

 

That's what we got so far.

>> John Cochrane: The big puzzle is you're going down the Ohio river and wages are better on the left and you choose to go to the right.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Yes. Wages are higher, land is cheaper, yet you go away from against interest, as it were.

 

So, you know, I don't, I don't know that we, that that's. If you. That's our puzzle, right. Which I would resolve in the theoretical framework is resorting to amenities. I can pivot to a discussion of amenities. Here would be another example with migration flows. Right. So for example, you know, we see people seem to prefer to migrate to places where there are no slaves, that's like a revealed preference test swarms from New England.

 

Do you could also look at something really simple which is do we see evidence of this preference driving the migration choice very locally from. So I mean, you know, this is very close to the population result, except we're looking at people who are making choices during their own life.

 

So let's look at someone who's born in New Hampshire, who moves to a county on the border like a diffusion. If the New Hampshire, whatever the adjective for people from New Hampshire is, if they're just diffusing, we kind of expect to find them when they 5001000 miles out to be more or less on the same proportion either side of the border.

 

Turns out that's not the case, right? So these are. Everybody thinks economists work with pie charts a lot here. So going to the bad stereotype here. So, if you look at these pie charts, say you know if you're from New Hampshire. So that would be this pie chart.

 

It turns out they diffuse to the border. Right. But 75% of them are found on the free side of the border. That it turns out is true for like just about every category we can measure. Of the 70 or so places of birth that we can identify where they probably moved, they had to move to the border region.

 

Maybe five of them are over represented on the side where there's slavery. Okay, so continuing resolving this puzzle that we're seeing revealed preference. See this for Europe as well, one sec. You can also see this in textual evidence, right? So people are talking about where would you like to go?

 

Where's a good place for movers?

>> John Cochrane: Migration isn't the current wage. It's sort of the present value of future wages. So in fact, going to the Ohio side was a really smart decision because Ohio was going to develop in ways that Kentucky never did develop. Not quite sure how they knew that at the time, but they were certainly, they were right actually in that decision.

 

 

>> Hoyt Bleakley: In the sense that the land values are rising.

>> John Cochrane: The land values are rising, that's what industrialized future opportunities were better. So if you don't look at the flow wage and if they kind of sense that this is like a stagnant society, it's going to stay this way forever.

 

Exactly what you mentioned, I'm going to get in, going to be hard for a couple years, low wages, but then it's going to be great, you look on, you look in the Kentucky station. No, that's not going to happen over there.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: I, I doubt that they were thinking that we're going to get the second industrial revolution in 50 years or whatever.

 

You know, 95% of the population was rural. Maybe they're thinking the wheat reaper is coming or something. From what we see written about this, they're talking about you're going to like the society better.

>> Valerie Ramey: To what extent might it be you would know this better than I? In the south, didn't you have a more rigid social hierarchy?

 

So it was very hard to rise. Whereas in the north there was a lot more opportunity for upper mobility, you know, and this is just among pre that I'm talking, obviously.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Yes, that's right. I think so.

>> Valerie Ramey: Then that plays into what John was saying. You don't have to think about a big industrial revolution.

 

It's just.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: That's right.

>> Valerie Ramey: People kind of knew, you know, there was the Tara plantation and you, you had to be born into that, but then there was, it was, you know, the opposite in The North.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: I suspect there's some of that. I don't know if it's coming from like barriers to mobility or just the fact that the distribution is so spread out that it's.

 

And that the folks at the top are the politicians. And so that might generate barriers to mobility, but it also might just make it seem really far away from. Very far away from you. Not something that's attainable. But I think that's right. They did look at a society, as I said, that was a middle class society versus one that very much wasn't.

 

 

>> Speaker 8: I want to ask you a bit about the slave patrols. Jeffrey Rogers Hummel argued that slave patrols and other subsidization, the enforcement costs of slavery, including the fugitive slave laws, comes to interstate escape, were fundamental to the profitability of slavery for the slave owners. That this is why, you know, the difference between profitability, macroeconomic efficiency is found there.

 

And you pointed out that free whites living in the antebellum south were conscripted, which into slave patrols. Unfortunately, the literature of slave patrols is still relatively thin, as far as I know, over the last few decades.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: There's one book.

>> Speaker 8: There's one, yeah. Book is the best.

 

 

>> Hoyt Bleakley: That is right. Yeah.

>> Speaker 8: But even that, I think only focuses on the Carolinas and Virginia, maybe Westmoreland County, Virginia.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: Yeah.

>> Speaker 8: Right, right. So do you have a.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: I'm going. To the Virginia Museum of History and Culture in three weeks to get a few more counties because this seems like.

 

 

>> Speaker 8: This is more than a small issue when it comes to the bigger debate going back to, you know, time of the cross, but also status and amenities and the desirability of living in a society with more rigid class structure, but also the prospect of being conscripted into a slave patrol.

 

 

>> Hoyt Bleakley: For somebody else's wealth.

>> Speaker 8: For somebody else as well, so the lack of freedom for free whites in the antebellum south who were not slave owners is sometimes understated through all of these decisions. So you have a sense that this, of the, of the kind of the scope of the importance of this to the political economy really and to the scope of its importance in people's sense of status, social mobility and identity.

 

Or is this, as you suggested, something that we need Lots, lots more research.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: So I focused on the slave patrols because it at least is in principle measurable. I could say how much time is being taxed away of the non slave owner. These other aspects are just I'm an economist that works with numbers, and so I like to work with what I can quantify.

 

There's certainly lots of evidence in the, you know, what people wrote that said, yeah, this is. It's not good to be in a place where the society is run by some, you know, for somebody else's interests. Obviously, the enslaved thought that. But this is free people talking. Free poor whites, basically.

 

There's a good book. Maybe you don't like it. Actually, maybe. I think I liked it when I first read it. Keri Leigh Merritt book that goes through this. I can see why she didn't get a job because it was like recycling a bunch of hint and helper quotes.

 

So maybe that was a challenge to her or maybe the topic was a challenge. But, I mean, when I first read it, I thought it was a very good recitation of, Helper is a controversial figure, of course, in both time periods. But it's a. It's an. I think, is an excellent recitation of, like, all the reasons why poor whites were very attended to their lower status in the society and that they were sort of not taken care of.

 

And the Northern Irish woman, McCrary, is that her name? She writes about, like, the whole society was that the planters thought that the poor whites were their clients, and the poor whites sort of half accepted it, but hated it. Right. And so there was what has been described as the paternalistic system included the poor whites as subservient.

 

That's the McCrary's argument. I think there's some truth to it. But, you know, if I have a choice to be in a place where I have agency and people recognize me as equal versus I am a subservient, you know, all else equal, I'm going to pick the place where I have agents.

 

 

>> Speaker 8: So you are doing a lot more empirical work on the slave patrols themselves.

>> Hoyt Bleakley: I don't know. We'll see what's in Richmond, right? Yeah, I will try to finish it, okay. I'll just make one point here, which is that the migrant, references to the states appear pretty equally in travelogues.

 

But if you look at these guides that are intended for migrants, there's a very disproportionate thing. So if you, you know, think of this as like the lonely Planet, except for, am I going to migrate somewhere? Right. And, you know, they just. They just don't. They're talking about New York they talk about Iowa, Indiana.

 

They don't talk about the Southern states as much. So it's. There's sort of this equilibrium where everything is the migrants, and the books that are oriented towards migrants are very much about Southern place. This area would be unfit for the English immigrant. The advantages of being in Kentucky would hardly compensate for most people for being in a slave state.

 

John here at the county fairs. So this is where you get to go hang out with your buddies. Farmers, you can see the border there, right? So the county fairs. Is this like nice. If you've ever been to one, go to one, these nice institutions, even in the weird marketized version of them we have today.

 

They're just kind of nice to take your kids to. These were like centers of the community getting together and describing, you know, how to farm and so forth. They were real communications of technology. I'll skip forward. Hinton Helper. The Lords of the Lash are not just the masters of the blacks, but also the oracle and arbiters of the non slaveholding whites.

 

Haddon. There's Keri Leigh Merritt again. Recommend that book. I'm supposed to finish Counterfactuals. People like counterfactuals. Been writing about what if the Civil War never happened? People like Counterfactuals for Abraham. What if Abraham Lincoln were a vampire hunter? Hopefully I've softened you up with a more reasonable counterfactual, which is what would happen in Kentucky if there were some kind of gradual emancipation.

 

Cassius Clay argues that he would do just as well, maybe even better because the land would appreciate even though he lost his slave. We do some calculations. It's a close call. It's probably not true for a large slave owner, but for most people it's probably true. Most landowners are going to be better.

 

Okay, I'll just keep moving forward here since I'm supposed to end. So there's a lot of literature within economics that think about land as the thing to look at for policy impacts of local policies. Well, this is a regional policy, but it's still something where you could think about land as being the immobile factor.

 

And so we're going to compare areas that should be awful similar. And it turns out that this restriction on land use, right, abolition is a restriction on land use, but it's associated with higher land values and higher land uses. And so that suggests that that restriction is actually doing something that's changing the character of the society, of the institutions that favors development.

 

And our working solution here is that the political economy, the slave system was bad for the non slave holding whites that they preferred an environment that was maybe throughout most of history was not available to him because if you're comparing two feudal systems those are your choices but here what's unusual is that there's this other opportunity available to them.

 

And I'll say that's the kind of final irony here which is that while the US history is kind of being cast as this characterized and U.S. economic growth as being characterized as dependent on coercion and dispossession it's the non coercion part of the country that's really the model for economic success and modern economic growth that free people find so attractive.

 

And so just as the people line up at the border to get into countries where there's high levels of productivity they were attracted to places the free states where there was something that they found very valuable. We argue it was the economic and political agency, and I will conclude there.

 

Thank you.