Even if slavery became inefficient for industrial production, its core appeal is its malleability. Throughout history, it has served timeless human desires for sexual exploitation, luxury status symbols (owning people), loyal servants, and even government bureaucrats. This adaptability makes it a threat in any economic system, including modern ones.
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Anti-slavery movements thrived in 'societies with slaves,' like Pennsylvania, rather than 'slave societies,' like Barbados. In Pennsylvania, slavery existed, so people were confronted with its morality, but the economy wasn't dependent on it. This allowed for questioning without risking the collapse of the entire socio-economic order.
The fact that slavery abolition was a highly contingent event demonstrates that moral progress isn't automatic. This shouldn't be seen as depressing, but empowering. It proves that positive change is the direct result of deliberate human choices and collective action, not a passive trend. The world improves only because people actively work to make it better.
Fears of mass unemployment from AI overlook a key economic principle: human desire is not fixed. As technology makes existing goods and services cheaper, humans invent new things to want. The Industrial Revolution didn't end work; it just created new kinds of jobs to satisfy new desires.
America intentionally avoided solving illegal immigration because it serves a crucial economic purpose: providing a flexible, cheap labor force that doesn't draw on social safety nets. This benefits industries and consumers while placing little burden on the state.
Love is a powerful motivator within families and small groups. However, at a societal scale, it fails. A society that expects love to scale, like communism, inevitably resorts to force when that expectation is not met. Money, via markets, is the only scalable, non-coercive alternative.
The successful anti-slavery movement in Britain was founded primarily by entrepreneurs who applied their skills in scaling companies and operations to a moral cause. This historical example shows that business acumen is a powerful, and perhaps essential, tool for large-scale social change.
During the American Revolution, Britain and the colonies used slavery to attack each other's character. Each side accused the other of hypocrisy without any genuine commitment to abolition. This political mud-slinging was crucial because it transformed slavery from a normal fact of life into a blameworthy, immoral act in the public consciousness.
Even if AI can perfectly replicate all goods and services, human desire for authenticity, connection, and imperfection will create a premium for human-provided labor. This suggests new economies will emerge based not on efficiency, but on providing what is uniquely and quirkily human.
The idea that growing wealth and education automatically lead to more compassionate values is historically false. Wealthy societies, from the Roman Empire to 18th-century Europe and Belle Époque France, have often been the most deeply committed to slavery and colonialism, using their resources to create more efficient systems of oppression.
The common theory that slavery ended because it became economically inefficient is a myth. Economic historians argue that, absent political intervention, the slave economies of the British Empire would have continued to thrive well into the 19th century. Slaveholding societies never voluntarily gave up the practice because it was unprofitable.