> If it can't be measured, it should be omitted. Nobody is suggesting making up random numbers based off feelings.
Then reparations for slavery are completely off the table. You can't measure the economic output of someone who died 150-400 years ago. There are major disputes about what a human life is worth now, when we know every possible detail about them.
> First off, if your dad is actually 25, you are fantastically intelligent for your age
I think you missed where I said "have had to pay" (meaning "when he was 25").
> But there is a way to pay off -- if nothing else -- the debt of unpaid hours.
Let's assume, first, that people are owed money that rightfully belonged to their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents. I would disagree with that, but I'll leave that aside for now.
How much are the following worth, in today's dollars?
- 1 hour of planting crops at 3pm on a sunny day in Alabama in February of 1802
- 1 hour of planting crops at 10am on a cloudy day in Georgia in March of 1791
- 1 hour of breastfeeding a slaver's baby
- 1 hour of cooking food for a 10-person family
Are those worth $5? Surely not, because minimum wage is higher than that. But that is what a lot of undocumented immigrants get paid for the same work, so maybe $5 is correct?
Or is it worth $50, because those people's bodies were in constant pain from beatings, over-work, malnutrition, and poor health care?
Let's say we settle on $25/hour. If we divide it up between that person's 1,000+ descendants, it's not much money. But then we have to consider the interest! Should we use the national rate of inflation? Should we just peg it to the adjusted dollar? Should we assume that money would've been invested in gold?
I think you see my point. There is no way to come up with a formula for any of this that makes any sense. And then once you get to the end and decide on a number, how do you decide who pays it? Should recent immigrants pay reparations for slavery? Should a rural, white meth addict lying in their own vomit pay reparations for all of their "privileges"?
It makes far, far more sense to just have a strong society safety net and not try to figure out what events 100, 200, or 500 years ago resulted in someone's current situation.
> if there is one thing the world respects about Germany, it's that they owned up. We can too
The example of Germany supports my point. Here are the major differences:
- Germany was forced to pay most of its reparations by the Allies
- Planning for German reparations began a few months after the war ended
- Many Germans were enslaved by the Allies as a form of reparation, and those people were then paid reparations
- Much of the rest of Germany's reparations were paid directly to Holocaust survivors[1] or their spouses or to Israel, not to millions of their descendants hundreds of years later[2]
The best number I can find for the total reparations paid by Germany is ~€60B, which translates to €4.3k for every living Jew (~14M) since 1945. I know that's not perfect, because some Holocaust survivors are dead and many living Jews are not descended from one, but bear with me.
If you look at that number yearly by person, you get €57/person/year.
That is not a meaningful amount of money compared to the consequences of slavery, even if you change it by a couple of orders of magnitude. Germany arguably owes Jewish people trillions of euros, not billions.
It seems as though you're saying that because we can't get a perfect estimate for cost, the next best guess is $0.
There's obviously a lot of tolerance on these estimates, but even with extreme tolerances $0 seems a bit low.
> There is no way to come up with a formula for any of this that makes any sense
The first step would be having a serious discussion about every question you raised. They're all good questions, and with some amount of investigation, yield closer and closer answers.
This is a daunting task -- no doubt -- but I see no reason why you should be opposed to it, or assume it's impossible.
> It seems as though you're saying that because we can't get a perfect estimate for cost, the next best guess is $0.
Correct.
> This is a daunting task -- no doubt -- but I see no reason why you should be opposed to it, or assume it's impossible.
I'm opposed to trying to adjudicate a distant and poorly-documented past in order to take money from one group and give it to another. That's why the best estimate, for me, is $0. The first thing to do is to do no more harm, and as we see from the enslaved-Germans example, reparations can end up being another injustice that needs to be repaired.
I am not opposed to fixing the unfair deficits caused by slavery, but I don't think we need to (or that it's ethical to) look at history to do that. We can simplify it to, "Who was born with fewer opportunities? Who has fewer opportunities now? Who is discriminated against now?"
In many cases, the most deeply affected parties will overlap with the people affected by the legacy of slavery. But we'll also cover people who had generations of near-slavery (e.g. white Appalachian sharecropper who became timber workers and then coal miners), as well as people are suffering deeply from modern atrocities like the opioid crisis.
Then reparations for slavery are completely off the table. You can't measure the economic output of someone who died 150-400 years ago. There are major disputes about what a human life is worth now, when we know every possible detail about them.
> First off, if your dad is actually 25, you are fantastically intelligent for your age
I think you missed where I said "have had to pay" (meaning "when he was 25").
> But there is a way to pay off -- if nothing else -- the debt of unpaid hours.
Let's assume, first, that people are owed money that rightfully belonged to their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents. I would disagree with that, but I'll leave that aside for now.
How much are the following worth, in today's dollars?
- 1 hour of planting crops at 3pm on a sunny day in Alabama in February of 1802
- 1 hour of planting crops at 10am on a cloudy day in Georgia in March of 1791
- 1 hour of breastfeeding a slaver's baby
- 1 hour of cooking food for a 10-person family
Are those worth $5? Surely not, because minimum wage is higher than that. But that is what a lot of undocumented immigrants get paid for the same work, so maybe $5 is correct?
Or is it worth $50, because those people's bodies were in constant pain from beatings, over-work, malnutrition, and poor health care?
Let's say we settle on $25/hour. If we divide it up between that person's 1,000+ descendants, it's not much money. But then we have to consider the interest! Should we use the national rate of inflation? Should we just peg it to the adjusted dollar? Should we assume that money would've been invested in gold?
I think you see my point. There is no way to come up with a formula for any of this that makes any sense. And then once you get to the end and decide on a number, how do you decide who pays it? Should recent immigrants pay reparations for slavery? Should a rural, white meth addict lying in their own vomit pay reparations for all of their "privileges"?
It makes far, far more sense to just have a strong society safety net and not try to figure out what events 100, 200, or 500 years ago resulted in someone's current situation.
> if there is one thing the world respects about Germany, it's that they owned up. We can too
The example of Germany supports my point. Here are the major differences:
- Germany was forced to pay most of its reparations by the Allies
- Planning for German reparations began a few months after the war ended
- Many Germans were enslaved by the Allies as a form of reparation, and those people were then paid reparations
- Much of the rest of Germany's reparations were paid directly to Holocaust survivors[1] or their spouses or to Israel, not to millions of their descendants hundreds of years later[2]
The best number I can find for the total reparations paid by Germany is ~€60B, which translates to €4.3k for every living Jew (~14M) since 1945. I know that's not perfect, because some Holocaust survivors are dead and many living Jews are not descended from one, but bear with me.
If you look at that number yearly by person, you get €57/person/year.
That is not a meaningful amount of money compared to the consequences of slavery, even if you change it by a couple of orders of magnitude. Germany arguably owes Jewish people trillions of euros, not billions.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/world/europe/for-60th-yea...
2. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/german-holocaust-repara...
3. https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/410502/23e348e9f5c6c0...