via George Hotz Is Taking on Tesla by Himself.
There is 1 huge mistake that most people make concerning economic history. This is still pretty unknown so not blaming him, but it’s critical to beginning to address the huge issue at hand. We are all taught in school the false fact that “The reason slavery ended is because we had an industrial revolution that made man’s muscles obsolete.” Since Fogel & Engerman’s Time on the Cross (1974), econ historians have struggled to explain the robust finding that slavery was doing great in the 19th century and actually growing and getting more productive well beyond what could be explained with tech. Only recently this is beginning to be resolved (my fav is Ed Baptist’s recent The Half Has Never Been Told) and we’re discovering that productivity can also be raised with torture, large-scale work camps, horizontal and vertical market integration, mass rape, and other methods used by the later (1830s until the war) slavers of the South West (MS and LA). This new industrial slavery was genocidal but very successful and the political-economic-ethical decision to fight a massively bloody war was necessary to eradicate it. I think we (the human race) face a similar challenge now, and hope a global bloody civil war can be avoided… wait… it’s already begun :'(
Punkonomics (@DearBalak) 