Mine were yes-or-no questions.
only yes or no questions if you want crude over-simplications that people not well-read will not comprehend
How would you describe the NBER as a sub-group then?
My issue isnt their academic publications as much as their interest in APPLIED economics.
Are you suggesting that the AEA membership is equally focused on policy issues and applied economics? That even NBER members' academic publications (as opposed to their contract work) is more different in terms of focus on policy matters?
When i glance at the
AEA annual meeting paper titles, i see what looks like at least 50% more academic theory stuff than APPLIED policy or business stuff. I'm just tryin to figure out what this NBER group is about.
"The NBER is committed to undertaking and disseminating unbiased economic research among
public policymakers, business professionals, and the academic community."
These are policy oriented people moreso than the wider AEA seems to be. No?
No, I thought about ways to explain this to you but since you seem to be convinced of your position so be it.
I will leave you with the point that just around half of the AEA members are academics, and since there are just over 1000 associates and fellows at NBER as listed by
NBER Family members and as they boast over 1000 professors of economics and business, I'm going to say that a random sampling of AEA members will find just as many policy-oriented individuals as a sampling of NBER.
Is there actually an objective way of measuring the overall utility? I mean, supposing that Friedman is including the slaves in his analysis, and you are including them in yours, will both of you unequivocally reach precisely the same conclusion? Or could there be a slight difference between your measurements?
Basically, is the measurement itself arbitrary?
There is, in fact, an objective way of measuring utility in a market, Samuelson's theory of Revealed Preferences. You see this being used increasingly in consumer-oriented businesses where they are using consumer data to construct indifference curves for consumers and aggregate them together for overall indifference curves.
For this specific case (slavery), there is obviously not a way to measure overall utility of antebellum slavery - but you don't necessarily need that. Start with the assumption that all men are created equal (therefore weight of preferences are the same).
Slavery obviously has a high disutility associated with it given empirical observations (willingness to escape despite dangers, need for constant bondage, punishment, threats, and a supply of new slaves).
You can actually measure the utility gain consumers experience based on price elasticities of demand (taking into account that there is also a loss of consumption utility under slavery as the slaves do not get to choose their consumption bundles) and the marginal production changes so you can determine the cost increase and the resulting consumer utility gain/loss.
The only thing left to do is estimate the disutility associated with slavery, there are several ways to do this:
1. Based on the central limit theorem, the large amount of slaves means that the distribution of disutility associated with slavery to slaves should be approximately distributed like the overall population's disutility. Therefore polling the wage people would demand for the labor involved and circumstances over a large sample should estimate the same for what disutility would be associated with modern slavery.
2. To look at a historical view, look at the observation of total wage/transfer demanded by newly freed slaves to continue to work in the field or the change in wage, essentially another form of revealed preferences.
Additionally, an estimation of the proportion of would-be slaves that are/would have been better suited for non-slave work to measure loss of efficiency in other production fields/the rate of technological progress could be used.
Unless people have significantly different estimations of the disutility involved with slavery or choose to not start under the assumption that all men are created equal (therefore weight preferences differently based on their valuations of groups), the numbers may be slightly different but the conclusion drawn will be the same.
In most marginal analysis, first you derive the various utility maximizing outcomes before finding the exact shape of the utility function.
If you are wondering about whether people actually study of the efficiency of slavery in America, there are a variety of papers on the subject, I didn't really look to see if they approach the utility question or whether they stick purely to the firm-side of the economic question:
Ergin & Sayan. A Microeconomic Analysis of Slavery in Comparison to Free Labor Economies
Coleman & Hutchinson. Determinants of Slave Prices: Louisiana, 1725 to 1820
They also wrote Trade Restrictions and Factor Prices: Slave Prices in Early Nineteenth Century US
Cole, Shawn. Capitalism and Freedom: Manumissions and the Slave Market in Louisiana, 1725-1820
Conrad & Meyer. The Economics of Slavery in the Ante Bellum South
Findlay, Ronald. Slavery, Incentives, and Manumission: A Theoretical Model.
Goldin, Claudia. Urban Slavery in the American South, 1820–1860: A Quantitative History.
Fenolato, Stefano. Slavery and Supervision in Comparative Perspective: A Model.
Fleisig, Heywood. Slavery, the Supply of Agricultural Labor, and the Industrialization of the South.
McCloskey, Donald. Does the Past Have Useful Economics?
Bergstrom, T. On the Existence and Optimality of Competitive Equilibrium for a Slave Economy.
Jones & Hoepner. The South's Economic Investment in Slavery.
Sutch, Richard. The Profitability of Antebellum Slavery -- Revisited.
A New Perspective on Antebellum Slavery: Public Policy and Slave Prices
I suspect at least one or two went about attempting to estimate the utility gain or loss between free-market manual labor and slavery in those markets.
