Slavery’s impact on regional rates of economic growth, the workings of the interstate slave trade.
Economists have done significant research into many other questions about American slavery not treated in this entry. These include slavery’s impact on regional rates of economic growth, the workings of the interstate slave trade , the demographics of the slave family, and slave health and nutrition. But focusing on slavery’s profitability and inefficiency exposes the true horror of this labor system. Slavery inflicted on African Americans tremendous pain, suffering, and sometimes death , along with other less brutal burdens such as lost income. This massive decline in welfare from output inefficiency did increase the South’s production of cotton and other goods, but classical inefficiency had the opposite effect on the South’s total output. The misallocation of African American labor through restrictions on manumission made non-slaveholding southern whites poorer as well, as did their burden from the enforcement inefficiency of mandatory slave patrols . The net effect on the Sou...