Tweet [1]
The mathematician Daniele Struppa – who is my dear friend and former Dean at GMU, and now President of Chapman University – sent to me the following e-mail in response to my letter [2] on Matthew Desmond’s unhinged-from-reality argument that American capitalism is a direct descendant of slavery. In making his case, Desmond bizarrely described modern accounting practices as tracing their origins back to slavery.
Here’s Daniele:
John Mellis, in his “A brief instruction on how to keep…” [A Brief Instruction and manner how to keep books of accounts] from 1588, already introduced depreciation, so the comment that [Desmond] makes in his article about depreciation originating from the need to account for slaves’ diminishing productivity is another historically false statement.