[ertgbnm]

I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.)

I hope we are in a similar era with regards to climate change. Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively unlimited renewable energy that literally falls from the sky like manna. With a bit of social pressure we should be able to extinct the fossil fuel industry in my opinion.

[legitster]

> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.)

More or less.

Adam Smith famously wrote that slavery was economically detrimental way back in 1776. It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery, and even to this day, people still equate slavery with prosperity (as implied by that controversial 1612 Project article, for example).

Another way to think about it, the South did not embrace slavery because it made them richer; the South embraced slavery because they opposed industrialization. Southerners would regularly complain about the hustle and bustle of the North, the size of the cities, and how hard regular (white) people had to work. The "Southern way of life" was a thing - a leisurely, agrarian society based on forced labor and land instead of capital.

In this regard it's a doubly fitting metaphor because much of the opposition to abolishing slavery was cultural and not economic.

[roenxi]

> Adam Smith famously wrote that slavery was economically detrimental way back in 1776. It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery...

Slavery had basically been a thing for all of human history up to that point, and based on my discussions on HN many smart people don't believe a lot of what Adam Smith said. There are still a lot of basic economic ideas that would make people much wealthier that struggle to get out into the wild. With that perspective the near-total abolition of slavery in a century seems pretty quick. And it can't really be a social thing because it is clear from history that societies tolerate slavery if it makes sense.

And we see what happened to the people who tried to maintain slavery over that century - they ended up poor then economically, socially and historically humiliated.

[Braxton1980]

Mississippi declaration of secession.

"“Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world....Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth.”

Georgia

"“The prohibition of slavery in the Territories… is destructive of our rights and interests.”

[xhkkffbf]

Capital was actually a big part of it. The plantation owner didn't just need to capitalize the cost of the land, but the labor as well. When someone purchased a slave, they were paying up front for the remaining labor that could come from that body. This was often pretty expensive when the body was young. Before the Civil War, New Orleans was one of the biggest banking centers of the US because of all of the borrowing.

People often make the mistake that the labor was "free". It wasn't to the people who bought slaves. It wasn't even really free to the slave traders because of the cost of transport.

It was a horrible system in many ways, but it was also a outrageously expensive because of all of the banking and loans involved.

[MengerSponge]

Technology developed after Smith's writing changed the calculus. The cotton gin made wide-scale cotton cultivation far more lucrative, and drove American slavery: https://historyincharts.com/the-impact-of-the-cotton-gin-on-...

Without the cotton gin, chattel slavery would have probably ended at least one generation earlier in the US

[helterskelter]

The south wasn't really situated for industrialization at the time. They didn't have enough rivers that could turn a water wheel effectively. (That's what I've heard anyway)

[munificent]

> It still took nearly 100 years to abolish slavery, and even to this day, people still equate slavery with prosperity (as implied by that controversial 1612 Project article, for example).

The enslaved people sure as fuck aren't prospering in that situation, so the only way one could possibly equate slavery with economic prosperity is by simply not counting them as people at all.

> Another way to think about it, the South did not embrace slavery because it made them richer; the South embraced slavery because they opposed industrialization... and how hard regular (white) people had to work.

One way to think of slavery is that it's a far point on the continuum between equality and inequality. What they really hated was equality because that necessarily involves taking something away from them, the people who have the most.

[aydyn]

I am quite hopeful. One benchmark that was passed only very recently was Levelized Full System Cost parity in Texas. That is, the total cost of generating electricity via renewables, importantly, including storage and infrastructure costs became equivalent to other options.

I don't think this gets talked about enough because its truly a milestone.

It's still more expensive in colder places, but the math is changing very fast.

[JumpCrisscross]

> With a bit of social pressure we should be able to extinct the fossil fuel industry

Taking Europe versus China, California versus Texas, it seems like social pressure is less effective than markets. Let markets build the power source they want to build and lo and behold you get lots of solar and wind and batteries.

[Retric]

That’s true today, it wasn’t true when Germany was heavily subsidizing solar to get economies of scale going.

Solar is historically a great example where public / private collaboration actually had a place. Even if today it’s time to let market forces work.

[floatrock]

It's a cute ideal, but you can't disentangle government from the energy sector. It's too big.

How do markets build infrastructure as large as an LNG terminal without the government tipping the scales with various guarantees? How do you build a literal coastline of refineries without government clearing the way with permissive regulations? How can you say "let markets figure it out" when the US military is the acquisition department of Halliburton's Iraqi joint venture?

Pretending "markets can figure it out if we just remove government subsidies" is hopelessly naiive. Geopolitics is mostly energy policy.

[iSnow]

Wait, which part is China and which is Europe? Solar didn't win in China because of social pressure, but also not because of market forces. It did win because the CCP made energy independence a political goal.

[thrance]

If we let the markets have their way, Earth becomes unhabitable. Coal and oil plants aren't being shut down. In fact, we have more than ever with additional ones on the way.

[Rapzid]

We are at the tail end of 30+ years of successful social awareness efforts, and government regulation and incentivization.

Social awareness and pressure produced the government action necessary to incubate the early markets and seed research. It helped to spur the armies of young researches set about improving solar generation, wind generation, power storage, electric motors, and even LEDs.

Yeah, it's "obvious" now the economics make sense for producers to build wind and solar farms. Or yeah, purchasing LEDs is a no-brainer now why on earth would anyone want to incandescent bulbs; that's boomer tech.

[hyperman1]

I've read somewhere how the English people industrialized because they had problems that could not be fixed by human or animal power. Mines became too deep, pumping too hard. The ancient greek knew about steam engines, but had no use for them. The English did, in their mines. Necessity as mother of invention. Then machines freed us from hard labour and gave us free time.

[cyberax]

Greeks had toys that couldn't produce meaningful amounts of power. And they had no real ways to improve that.

[WhompingWindows]

Your revisionist history isn't on point for US slavery.

Industrialization actually increased slavery in the South. Demand for cheap cotton came from English and then American industrialization. A machine, a product of industrialization, the cotton gin, shackled the chains of slavery ever tighter in the South, as it increased the processing speed of raw cotton. Combine that with acquisition of huge swathes of Mexican territory via unjust conquest, and you had industry demanding cotton and lots of new territory for slavery to potentially move into.

What ended slavery in the USA was the military necessity to free the slaves to save the Union in 1863. Lincoln would've ended slavery earlier or later if it could've saved the Union, he explicitly writes this in a public letter.

The government needed to destroy the rebellion, and slavery was the backwards un-economic stultifying institution enforced by a different culture, a different people: Southern Aristocrats. They used the psychology of emergency and fear to propagandize Southern nationhood and militarism, motivated their anti-democratic notions of "freedom" and "property rights".

This system needed to be torn down militarily and culturally, economically and politically it was probably stuck in place, because it was held in place by corrupt aristocracy.

Does the US have a corrupt aristocracy now holding other things in place that ought to be abolished?

[jjk166]

In the US the invention of the cotton gin reinvigorated slavery, which prior to that point had been declining. In the Antebellum south, slavery was profitable, with average return on slaves of about 8 to 10%. Even after slavery was legally abolished, extremely similar social institutions remained for decades (share cropping + institutionalized racism). It wasn't until the 1940s that cotton picking was mechanized.

The North steamrolled the South economically because manufacturing steamrolls agriculture in terms of productivity, but an apples to apples comparison between farmers shows slave owning plantations were economically more productive than free farmers. After abolition, the South's per capita productivity dropped substantially, and remained 20% lower per capita in 1880 than it had been in 1860.

Obviously slaves were individually much worse off than if they were free, and society as a whole suffered from the suppression of human capital. Had all those people been free for all that time, imagine what could have been accomplished besides growing more cotton. But for the slave-owner, there was never a point where abolition became economically advantageous, hence why slavery was ended at gunpoint.

[kbenson]

> After abolition, the South's per capita productivity dropped substantially, and remained 20% lower per capita in 1880 than it had been in 1860.

I wonder how much of that was because of economies of scale (Even if it's forced scale). Plantations are large and have many workers, and can scale without having to worry (to a degree) about retaining workers, since workers are for most intents just machines you invest in and pay to keep up in that system, which allows for easier scaling.

We've seen increasing consolidation of farms into large entities over the centuries, so perhaps this was just a system that made that much, much easier to do.

[colechristensen]

What will come with the approaching boom of guilt-free energy is public support for doing more things with more energy, and instead of stagnated per-capita energy use a return to more-than-linear energy usage growth.

With that you get flying cars, space tourism, AI, cities in deserts with free water through desalination, better indoor climates with freer ventilation with the outside, cities skies free of ICE smog and probably a whole lot of things which are hard to imagine.

[HerbManic]

I hope you are right. My fear is that it could allow unrestricted limits to tear down the rest of nature.

Alternatively, it could mean that we would no longer need to do that as a lot of materials that are restricted by energy costs become viable. If energy is almost free you can extract a lot of trace materials from almost anywhere.

[loeg]

My impression is that slavery was economically disadvantageous the whole time, but persisted in the South because of the relative power of the slaveholders.

[hnuser847]

Exactly. As distasteful as it is to put it in these terms, some slaveholders had massive "balance sheets" consisting of thousands of human "assets". Outlawing slavery meant reducing the value of these assets to zero.

[mcmoor]

I thought it was getting increasingly disadvantageous and on the way out, then cotton mill suddenly make it advantageous again, recementing slavery.

[mullingitover]

> belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous

On the contrary, historians broadly agree that industrialization (particularly the advent of the cotton gin) actually turbocharged the human trafficking industry in the US. The cotton gin moved the bottleneck for textile production onto enslaved people, since there was no automation available for planting, cultivating, or harvesting the cotton.

[KennyBlanken]

Not only that, but slavery in the south didn't "end" anywhere near as fast as people think it did. Even when plantations stopped using chains and shooting people for leaving the plantation, they just switched to slightly more subtle ways. Sharecropping, barring them from owning property, running lynch mobs to kill anyone who stepped afoul of the unspoken rules, and not allowing black people into most public spaces.

To this day southern conservatives talk about "state's rights" as being the reason for the civil war. Yeaaaaaah no

[api]

Re: slavery: I've wondered before if the arrow of causation might go both ways. Slavery has existed throughout history. With slaves, what's the incentive to industrialize? You have "free" and captive human labor. But take that away, and suddenly the idea of machines doing stuff for you seems a lot more compelling.

Slavery also displaces industry in the economy. Slave-driven industries compete with industrial development for investment funds and production driven by slave labor can compete with mechanized production. But if labor is suddenly expensive, mechanized production has an advantage, and if former slaves are now getting paid there are also more customers for the output of that production.

So industrialization may have played some role in abolition, but did abolition also drive industrialization? Slavery was abolished in Britain in the early 19th century and Britain was also the cradle of the industrial revolution, which started to hit very shortly after. America did not explode industrially until after it abolished slavery.

If we'd abolished slavery in Roman times we might have terraformed Mars by now.

[kbenson]

Salved are free in neither up front nor ongoing cost, just as industrial equipment is not. It comes down to costs. Industrial equipment that is most costly than slaves seems unlikely to supplant them based on monetary incentives alone, while once it is less costly it's just the social economic momentum which needs to be overcome, which is likely a matter of time.

Importantly, I think there's only so much advancement you can get out of people by investing in economies of scale and iterating on process (and people, as icky as that idea is), while there's a huge amount of advancement to get out of machinery, including moving to whole new categories of machinery (which depending on how far you want to take the "slaved are machines" metaphor is waht a shift away from slaves was in the first place). In that respect maybe what you're noting is just that the shift from slaves to machines was the first in an iterative process which is speeding up over time.

> If we'd abolished slavery in Roman times we might have terraformed Mars by now.

I think maybe the right was to look at it is if we were able to abolish slavery and keep the same output (which might have required an economic or social system that incentivized farm consolidation for economies of scale that plantations were able to more easily achieve), then yes, we would have terraformed mars by now, but probably just because we happened to be along the tech tree earlier in the timeline.

[anon291]

I have consistently held that solar will replace oil once solar becomes cheap. Literally you cannot beat the market. This is not revisionist. It's simply true. The same thing holds America back from barbarism. Our material wealth is what allows our society. That's why it's important to maintain both

[testing22321]

It depends how you look at it

> Surely there's a lot of money to be made in harnessing effectively unlimited renewable energy that literally falls from the sky like manna

China has solar panel production on lock. Nobody is going to make money there.

So from a western point of view, there is only a LOT of money to be lost by going solar. Anyone that invested in oil and gas, coal and even to a lesser degree nuclear is NOT going to go quietly.

Hence all the climate change denial and anti-renewable rhetoric from the current US regime

(To be clear I personally have my roof covered in panels and also hope like mad we can get everyone on board)

[thfuran]

Even if global greenhouse gas emissions immediately and permanently stop, climate change won’t. We have many years of further warming ahead of us due to the greenhouse gases already dumped into the atmosphere.

[triceratops]

Then we move on to carbon capture at scale.

[miltonlost]

> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement. (In reality it was certainly a convoluted mixture of the two I'm sure.)

I also never found the economic argument entirely convincing. If slavery were so economically disadvantageous in an industrialized society, why are there still slave labor in industrialized countries around the world today?

[Rexxar]

Which countries do you think of when discussing industrialised countries that use slave labour?

[ViewTrick1002]

Optimizing on an individual vs societal level.

[ZeroGravitas]

I read a piece that calculated the economic value of the slaves just before the civil war and compared it with investments in fossil fuels.

It made a convincing case that people would rather start catastrophic wars than just transition to a better economic system, if a few rich people had a lot to lose.

[dyauspitr]

Why though? For a business owner I can’t imagine a better situation than his workers working for free and having to do 16 hours a day under pain of death. This probably wouldn’t work with 80% of the populace enslaved but would work very well with 10-15% enslaved.

[kbenson]

It's not quite as straightforward as that though. You're also required to pay a large sum up front to get the worker, have to pay for room and board and health for the worker, including children of workers which while they are investments that may eventually pay off, are mostly cost sinks until at least a few years have passed. There's more of a trade-off that might be immediately obvious when you dig into the reality of what it took.

[lazide]

Slaves aren’t free.

You still need to feed them, clothe them, and house them.

You need to do basic medical care.

And now you have the problem that most of them would happily murder you in your sleep/if your back is turned, or run away never to be found. So the tend to be a pretty big security risk.

Oh, and also they’re slaves so good luck getting them to care about their work - way worse than a typical new hire retail employee even. So you need to do heavier supervision.

Oh, and you had to pay to acquire them - instead of give them an offer and pay them after they’ve worked for you successfully. So add that to the ‘risk’ pile.

[GuinansEyebrows]

> For a business owner I can’t imagine a better situation than his workers working for free and having to do 16 hours a day under pain of death

you really can't imagine a better situation than humans owning humans?

[dnautics]

> still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically...

not crazy especially as slavery was supplanted by debt, which is in a way fractional slavery (minus the chattel part ofc)

[matthewdgreen]

It was a socially-driven movement, but economics made it feasible for social concerns to win. The lesson is that you need both, and this is especially true when time is short.

[jmyeet]

There’s an effort to whitewash the horrors of chattel slavery that is really disgusting.

Estimated on the economics of slavery (that I’ve read anyway) seemingly ignore that slaves can make new slaves.

This is the dark side of slavery that seems to be rarely discussed. That is, the mass rape of slaves over centuries by their owners.

There was even an economic incentive for this because lighter skinned slaves were more desirable for domestic labor. By the 19th century this had gotten so absurd that some slaves were almost indistinguishable from white people due to generations of repeated rape, basically.

There was a book whose name escapes me that analyzed the records of one of the largest slave markets and it found that the price of girl slaves went way once they started menstruating. This was advertised. Why do you think that was?

We would line in a very different country if, after the civil war, every slave owner was strung up from a tree and their estates were redistributed to the formerly enclaved.

[05]

> We would line in a very different country if, after the civil war, every slave owner was strung up from a tree and their estates were redistributed to the formerly enclaved.

Yeah, but not for the reasons you think. A country that would just kill a significant share of its citizens for something that used to be legal very recently is not going to end up just fine. Moreover, due to normal distribution of human traits the next generation would have the same percentage of 'evil' with or without your well-intentioned genocide.. go figure.

[theowaway]

> the dark side of slavery

oh mate

[NewsaHackO]

So solar energy falls from the sky, but what about the resources it takes to make the panels?

[iknowstuff]

Insignificant and recyclable forever

[tonymet]

Slavery was ended in the USA by the Civil War veterans.

[atleastoptimal]

Which is funny because we've had an environmentally and economically optimal source of power since the 50s (nuclear) which we deliberately phased out due to panic cycles.

[shimman]

Is this a joke comment or do you not realize that people were treated like chattel slaves while working in the first factories?

[TacticalCoder]

> I am reminded by the perhaps revisionist history but still applicable belief that slavery was really ended by industrialization making abolition economically advantageous and not actually a socially driven movement.

I really don't understand why you're bringing slavery in a discussion about hydro. Why not bring Gaza? And Iran? This is a tech site after all: so, sure, bringing slavery in a talk about solar energy makes sense.

Note that the abolition of slavery is unrelated to industrialization: the islamic republic of Mauritania was the last country to officially abolish slavery and they did it in the 1980s. And it's very well known that slavery still persisted long after that and there are still people owning slaves today (not too sure why the other comment mentioning it was downvoted).

At this point I think people are just insane: they'll use any excuse, on any unrelated subject, to bring it the issues of slavery, patriarchy, Gaza (but not Iran), etc. But as soon as you point out actual patriarchal societies operating today or actual slavery still happening today or people having actual sex slaves in western countries (e.g. several members of the UK parliament are now running an enquiry into a gigantic gang-rapes operation with thousands of victims and an attempted cover-up by the authorities and the findings are beyond belief).

"Won't hear, won't see, won't speak -- shall only mention slavery, the patriarchy, Gaza and shall downvote".

HN is truly lost.

[crystal_revenge]

> I hope we are in a similar era with regards to climate change.

I'm struggling to understand the level of completely irrational rejection of reality in all these comments.

Emissions continue rise every year, we are already locked into extreme climate change, multiple nations are engaged in military conflicts to capture oil, we globally use more fossil fuels every year.

Companies are starting to convert jet engines into natural gas powered generator for AI data centers [0]

So far we've continually used 'green' energy to supplement the use of non-renewable fossil fuels. We have far more EVs on the road than we did a few years ago and are using more oil than before in the US (and producing more than we ever have).

We are already out of the standard IPC scenarios and potentially on track for a 'hot house earth' future [1].

It is quite clear that we are ramping up for global war over natural resources (largely fossil fuels) and we will burn the planet to the ground chasing the last drop of oil.

0. https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/how-jet-engines-are-...

1. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/11/point-of...