Word comes that Bob Fogel, an absolute giant in economic history and a Nobel Prize winner, passed away today. I first encountered Fogel in a class a decade or so ago taught by Robert Margo, another legendary scholar of the economics of American history.
Fogel’s most famous contribution is summarized in the foreword to the very readable Without Consent or Contract. “Although the slave system was horribly retrogressive in its social, political, and ideological aspects, it was quite advanced by the standards of the time in its technology and economic organization. The paradox is only apparent…because the paradox rests on the widely held assumption that technological efficiency is inherently good. It is this beguiling assumption that is false and, when applied to slavery, insidious.”
Roughly, it was political change alone, not economic change, which could have led to the end of slavery in America. The plantation system was, in fact…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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