Quotation of the Day…

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… is from page 209 of Art Carden’s and GMU Econ alum Caleb Fuller’s excellent new book, Mere Economics [footnotes deleted; links added]:

Pillage and plunder cannot explain why the average Briton, Belgian, or American is spectacularly wealthy by historical standards. The slave trade means lower incomes today in countries where it happened. Despite claims that we prosper because of the legacies left by our ancestors’ sins, slavery, imperialism, and colonialism made us poorer. Of the 10 to 16 million slaves brought to the New World, between 60 to 70 percent were shipped to Brazil or the Caribbean. Relatively few – 6 percent – landed in what is now the United States. If slavery could cause a Great Enrichment, it would have happened in Portugal and Brazil, not England and the United States. What’s more, until the nineteenth century, slavery existed virtually everywhere, and more Europeans were sold into slavery in North Africa than there were Africans transported to North America. Slavery did not spark a Great Enrichment 5,000 years ago or at any time.